


Good News, Bad News

by tatapb



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Banter, Co-workers, Daily Prophet, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Humor, scorose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:41:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27507757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatapb/pseuds/tatapb
Summary: Two sides of the same coin live in adjacent offices at the Daily Prophet: Good News and Bad News. Rose Weasley is all joy and repressive outbursts of anger, and Scorpius Malfoy stews in his cynicism and hides behind a smirk. When a Magical Storm ravages London, the two are yeeted into a forced cohabitation that works far, far better than either of them would have predicted.(Post-Hogwarts, Revoltingly Fluffy, Non CC Compliant, Mature for Smut at one point)
Relationships: Scorpius Malfoy & Rose Weasley, Scorpius Malfoy/Rose Weasley
Comments: 71
Kudos: 95





	1. Chapter 1

Yell, bang door. Rinse, repeat. 

Scorpius Malfoy stared at the door to his office, waiting for yet another aftershock of the Rose Weasley earthquake. 

“ _And another thing_ ,” she cried, storming in for the fifth time in the same number of minutes, red hair wild, blue eyes blind with rage. “Next time you decide to belay my order for new quills... _DON’T_!”

Her ‘and another thing’ days were his least favourite thing in the whole wide world. It was like she kept a mental tally of petty accusations well at hand, only to air them all out the next time she exploded - except she didn't air them all at once like normal people, oh _no_. She had to do it in tiny spurts as they came to her foaming mind. 

Hence the 'and another thing'.

At this point, the quill accusation was about two weeks old. Scorp had been waiting for it to come up and, when it hadn’t, he’d been relieved. After three weeks with no Incidents, he’d let himself be lulled into a false sense of security. Perhaps this was what life was going to be like as of now. Peaceful. _Quiet_. No banging doors.

And yet here they were.

“Oh, _and another thing_!” The door slammed closed behind her once more and she stared back at him, eyes smouldering and Scorp carefully hid the corner of his twitching mouth against the palm of his hand. 

“Yes?”

Not much of a point arguing, he’d found. Every word was a liability, just another thing for her to take offence. When she was in a strop, every sentence was like a condescending morsel that her umbrage would happily feast upon.

“Next time, close your _sodding_ door before falling dick first into sodding Jenny from bloody _Hocus Pocus_.” 

With a huff and a final slam of the door, Rose was gone. 

Scorp sighed. So now she wouldn’t talk to him so much as snap at him for a whole day and then she’d spend maybe another two avoiding him and pretending nothing had happened. 

Maybe Thursday she’d be back to her usual delightful self.

* * *

“I hope you don't choke on all that negativity,” Rose scolded, scratching yet another story from her notes, lips pursing together with apprehension. “You really have a knack for ruining everything good in this world.”

“I haven’t ruined absolutely anything. It already _was_.”

In fairness, he was right. She hadn’t known 29 of the 30 adopted kittens had been returned as of this morning - though, to be fair, the litter cleaning alone would’ve been insane so she couldn’t say she was _surprised_ … more disappointed. 

But Scorp did. It was his job to know. He was the Bearer of Bad News, just as she was the Bearer of Good News. Two sides of the same coin, positivity and negativity working in adjacent offices, separated by the flimsiest of walls.

“If you tell me the baby panda at the zoo died, I _will_ hex you.” She brushed a desperate hand through her curls, twisting them into a knot that needed no elastic band to hold itself together. When he stared blankly back at her, she hissed, “For the love of _Merlin_ , please tell me he's fine.”

He was the harbinger of literary death. His Bad News column was a mile long and every single time they sat down to cross their respective stories, her own list would get cut shorter and shorter and _shorter_.

Sometimes she wanted to cry. Sometimes she _did_ cry.

“Far as I know, the panda’s fine… _for now_.”

The tone of unavoidable tragedy in his voice sent a shudder up her spine. She licked her lips thoughtfully and launched another attack. “New Dragon Pox vaccine --”

“Untested.”

“Mysterious flowers arrived at every desk of the Ministry of Magic --”

“Two people had serious allergic reactions and are now recovering in St Mungo’s.” His tone was amused. “Plus one of the plants tried to strangle its recipient.”

“Fortescue’s employer saves child from choking?”

“That one’s _definitely_ mine." Scorp let out a snort, long fingers sorting through his notes with a deliberateness that made her breath hitch in her throat. "Here it is: choking... on a small _animal bone_. In her _ice-cream_.” He shook his head, amusement obvious. “Fortescue's is going to have a rough time of this.”

Oh Merlin, _why_.

Rose’s eyes were pleading and she worried at her lower lip. “Auror kneazle instated? Sniffs bags for contraband dragon blood?”

Scorp, on the other hand, was wearing his most phlegmatic expression yet. She supposed this was his own way of settling the score after her little outburst two days ago, a petty little vendetta that he was intent on paying back in full by making her miserable. She’d lost it completely to the point where she’d seen absolutely nothing but white, hot anger. It happened sometimes: her therapist blamed repression and denial as the likely cause.

Repression? What repression? There was no repression here. 

“Auror Kneazle has done nothing wrong... _yet_ ,” Scorp said, jotting a small note on the corner of his parchment. “You can keep that one.”

Rose shuddered. Those notes always came back to bite her on the arse. Any day now the wanker would walk in and present her with a particularly nasty piece of news on how the Auror kneazle had to be put down after eating someone's face off.

“What, you don’t want to spin it into ‘Auror jobs being stolen by kneazle'?”

His knee brushed against hers under the table for a second and their eyes locked, apprehension lingering in hers, indifference patent in his own. Grey eyes that were too serious, too sharp and infinitely more dangerous when the occasional laughter set them ablaze.

He stared hard at her for a few seconds before shaking his head, leg stiffly shifting away. “No, I’m good.”

* * *

“I come bearing Bad News,” he said, opening the door and slanting her a smirk. “It seems Auror Kneazle attacked one of his fellow Aurors. Shredded one of his legs, really.” He tutted, shaking his head with merry sympathy. “Gruesome sight.”

“Oh, _that_.”

Rose sighed with relief and Scorp’s eyebrows furrowed - that wasn’t the reaction he’d been batting for. Quite the opposite really.

“It seems there was a reason for it,” she continued, her blue eyes laughing, seemingly impervious to the blue devils he'd herded into her office. “Though I can’t exactly say it’s Good News either.”

He let himself fall on the chair on the opposite side of her desk and made himself comfortable - in spite of being the exact same make and model, the chairs in her office were somehow _much_ better than the ones in his. Everything about her office was, really, undoubtedly a reflection of the sunny personality that inhabited it.

She levitated a mug to him and filled it to the brim with coffee. Two sugars and a splash of milk followed shortly, just the way he liked it. He’d never actually told her and she'd never actually asked - somehow she just _knew_. He'd chatted about it with one or two people and had been somewhat disappointed when he'd found out that it was a widespread phenomenon. 

On top of her shoulder-chip collection, Rose also kept a very in-depth mental file on people's coffee proclivities, the thoroughness of which the Auror Department could only dream of.

“What then?”

“Seems the bloke was harassing one of his female coworkers,” she continued, taking a sip of her own mug with a small smile. “Kneazle took a fancy to her and the rest --”

“-- is News.” Scorp sighed. “The headline almost writes itself. 'Harassment in the Auror Force'?”

“I was thinking maybe 'Auror Kneazle Fights For Safer Workplace Environment'?”

She sent him one of her looks, the 'please don't be a dick' ones. 

Rose Weasley herself was bad news, mostly for him. She had absolutely no idea of how wrapped around her little finger she had him - she just kept accidentally tugging at the string, pulling him along like a helpless, flailing puppet. Her coffee, her chairs, her smile, all of them loosening hell inside him without giving the slightest hint as to whether or not she knew she was doing so. 

“Sure.” He took a sip of his coffee and nodded, biting down a scowl. “Have at it.”

“What else do you got?”

“Magical Storm Ravages Dundee.” 

Scorp rolled his neck, trying to relieve the stress that had been building in his shoulders. Somehow, just being there was making the knots on his back loosen, like misery knew it wasn't welcome in her cosy office and was running away for dear life lest Miss Positivity decided to have a go at it.

“Can’t argue with that one.” Rose winced slightly. “Are you sure it’s yours and not a Tragedies’ affair? Or Forecast’s?”

“While it _is_ technically weather,” Scorp said, rolling his eyes, “it doesn’t fall under the Prophet's Forecast's purview until it’s _incoming_ weather - The Edinborough Piper's all over it. And I’m not sure about Tragedies, I’ll have to ask Fletcher.”

Both their noses wrinkled at the thought of Fletcher. Nasty wanker, ran Tragedies from his corner office with far too much glee. The man had never met a murder or a natural catastrophe he didn’t like.

“How bad was it?” she asked softly. “Any casualties?”

“Nope.” Scorp shook his head, a small smile curling his mouth at the relief on her face. “None whatsoever.”

“Good,” she said, shaking her head and letting out a huff. “It’s just Bad News then. Fletcher can die in a ditch.”

* * *

“And another thing!”

This time, her anger wasn’t directed at him. It had become a joke of sorts at the office, seeing who she’d lash out at next. There was even a betting pool, started by, well, _him_. Honestly, so far, he _still_ hadn’t found any method to her madness. She’d be fine one moment and the next she’d bust a fuse at something completely innocuous.

This time the crazy girl from Astro News had left a cup of coffee next to Rose’s new coat and it had spilled all over it. Nevermind that any other day Rose would’ve laughed and Scourgified the damned thing - _today_ , she intended to tear the girl apart.

“-- it was _vile_ and insidious and it makes you an indefensible toerag - no, not an indefensible toerag, an indefensible toerag _stain_ to our profession!”

Scorp leaned against the doorframe of his office, hands in his pockets and to watch the Fury in action. She now was laying it out on Astro Girl for something she’d printed the previous week.

“You give Seers a bad name! How _dare_ you print that Taurus girls need to lose the extra flab? Do all Taurus girls need to lose extra flab? What about the anorexic Tauri, _do those need to lose the extra flab_?! How about you take _one_ good look inside and wonder why it is you think --”

Ironic, really. Maybe if Rose took one good look inside herself she wouldn’t be screaming at random people every three weeks to a month.

Fletcher brushed past him and slid him a slippery smile that made his insides curl with knee-jerk annoyance. As if that weren't enough, the words that tumbled out of his mouth were, "Control your wife, Malfoy."

"Bugger off before I take a page off her book," Scorp hissed back.

His eyes narrowed as Fletcher threw him a mortified 'oh what did I do to merit such an uncivil treatment' look over his shoulder and Scorp wondered whether it would be too juvenile to place a tripping spell smack dab on the door to his office. 

His eyes were diverted to his _work_ -wife, who, if nothing else, was absolutely magnificent when she was angry. He shook his head as she brushed past him, slamming the door to her office behind her. Scorp took a few languid steps into his own, fixed himself a cup of coffee, stirred it and was right back on time for the encore.

“And another thing! You keep heating your stupid fish in the kitchen and it stenches up the whole building!”

He couldn’t argue with that. If Astro Girl was the one stenching up the Prophet with fishiness, he was glad Rose was seeing to it. Tearing her a new one was a public service.

And tear she did. “I swear to _Merlin_ , next time I will _throw_ your damned lunch out the window --”

He then saw something that he never thought he’d witness. 

Astro Girl got up to her feet and gave the yelling, sputtering, flaming termagant a hug. And, Rose, who a second prior had been about to tear Astro Girl's insecurities to shreds, was crying instead of yelling and Astro Girl was patting her back and cooing soothing nonsense - something about ‘baby pandas’.

His heart pounded as he slowly backed away into his office, quietly closing the door behind him, eyes still wide as his horrified brain tried to process the image of Rose Weasley - sunny, gorgeous, positive Rose Weasley - coming undone in Astro Girl's arms. More disturbing still was the terrifying realisation that he wanted nothing more than to shove the poor excuse of a Sybil Trelawney aside and take the crying girl into his own arms.

Which was, of course, ludicrous and just a little short of stark, raving madness because generally speaking there was nothing that annoyed him more than a sobbing girl.

* * *

“I bring Excellent News,” Rose said, a wide grin on her face as she waltzed into Scorp’s office, a little spring in her step that all but died as she took him in. “This one you can’t ruin, it’s just perfection.”

“I’ll bet you a fiver I can.”

He leaned back against his chair and waved dismissively for her to sit. He looked tired, violet circles under his eyes and everything inside her ached to make it better, to somehow smack away the dark, cheerless clouds hanging over his head. 

Rose shook her head, leaning hesitantly the doorframe, unwilling to step into what suddenly felt like a very unwelcoming room. “I bet you tell small children Santa isn’t real.”

His quill was working furiously on something and she shuddered just thinking about the sort of negative wickedness that was coming out of it.

“It’s my go-to ice-breaker for any child under the age of seven, yes.”

“Can’t you be the least bit happy for once? Not everything’s doom and gloom.”

“Doom and Gloom has a nice ring to it.” Scorp rolled his eyes and scoffed, before his eyes flickered back to the notes in front of him. “Might change the name of the column to it. Coffee?”

Rose snorted. His coffee was as sad as the news he printed. “Mine’s better.”

“True," he said with a small, mirthless smile. "The grass really _is_ greener on the other side.” 

He gave the white wall separating their offices a half-hearted rap with his knuckles and sighed. 

Rose, who had been planning on dropping her bomb of endorphins all over his sullen little head and leaving, instead found herself asking, “You want one?”

She’d expected him to refuse. Instead, he blinked at her once and then got up to his feet. “Can I bring the Bad News? I’m late for my deadline as is.”

"Depends." She glared at the quill. “What'cha writing there, Negative Nancy?”

“Cauldron explosion kills family of five,” he said, mouth pressing into a thin line. “Doesn’t get any worse than that.”

“Not tragic enough for Fletcher?”

Cue in the morose smile. “Fletcher is a wanker. He’s too busy gloating over the fact that the storm’s now made twenty casualties in Manchester and is fast approaching London. He’ll probably get a spread on the first page. I, on the other hand, got… everything else.”

Bad News were relative. Sometimes, they were a nasty spin on Good News. Other times, they were just... _nasty_.

Compared to the storm, everything else was just Bad News.

Rose nodded. “Bring them over and I’ll tell you all about the dragons. It might brighten up your day.”

“Dragons?” 

He perked up a little at her words and grabbed hold of his quill and parchment, following her into the far happier domain that was her own office. 

“Chameleon Dragons, thought to be extinct for over a hundred years,” Rose said, casting a quick soothing spell on the chair before he sat on it. “Turns out they were just _really_ good at hiding.”

He let out a peal of caustic laughter. “That _is_ terribly good.”

Rose smiled, floating a mug over to him. “Still think you can ruin it?” 

“Incompetent dragonologists misplace entire breed for over a century?”

She shook her head. “Hasn’t the same effect. The incompetent dragonologists are best left as a funny footnote. I don’t even need to write it, people will just _think_ it and feel awfully pleased with themselves - like _you_ just did.”

“Of course _you’d_ think that,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee and leaning back against his chair before taking a deep breath. “I bet you tell people their dead grandmother is in a better place.”

In spite of the words and the tone, he was visibly less harried than he’d been before the news. Or it might just be the chair and the coffee.

* * *

It wasn’t the chair or the coffee or even the Good News. The halo of red hair was currently framing a delighted smile as she perused over her notes, her own fluffy blue quill writing at the speed of light, no doubt about dragons, sunshine and rainbows.

Scorp read over what his quill had written so far and sighed. 

Orphaned children, woe and misery, _et cetera et cetera_ , and then it went on to wax lyrical about blue eyes and red curls for over _four paragraphs_.

He blotted the words over and glared at his quill.

Rose snorted at something and looked over at him. “Guess what?” 

He stared blankly back at her. “Hmm?”

“Auror Kneazle got a commendation for bravery.”

Scorp brushed a hand through his hair and sighed. “You don’t say. What for?”

“Gallantry in action.” Her mouth curled into a grin. “Helped her partner detain three dangerous perps while waiting for reinforcements.”

“Did it shred their legs?”

“First of all, Auror Kneazle is a _she_ , have some journalistic integrity,” Rose said, letting out a dainty sniff. “Secondly, yes, she did, and we’re all very proud.”

“We are? I think I missed the memo.”

“This _is_ the memo,” she said, twirling her chair around. “We’re proud.”

When she stopped to grin at him, Scorp almost fell off his own chair.

* * *

The last couple of weeks had really taken a toll on him. There was no banter anymore, no giving fundamentally good stories a negative twist. As the storm approached and every single Tragedy kept falling on his plate, he sank further and further into himself. He was starting to look frankly haggard.

Scorp was drowning in Bad News and all Rose wanted to do was hold out a hand and pull him out.

Rose glanced at the clock. It was late and the light was still on next door. Occasional swearing could be heard from the other side of the wall - not that it was unusual, writers were a foul-mouthed bunch when under the yoke of a deadline.

She brewed a final mug of coffee and walked over to his office, opening the door and coming face to face with -- well, not face to face, face to bare, naked _arse_ , pants hanging around his thighs as he shagged Fiona from Arts and Warts against his desk. Rose's blood froze in her veins along with the rest of her body, eyes wide as she blinked, all breath leaving her body in a single sharp exhale that threatened to break her.

_Bugger._

He threw her a glance over his shoulder and blue eyes locked with grey for a fraction of a second before Rose quietly backed away and closing the door behind her. She leaned back against it for a second, legs shaking and closed her eyes.

Voices sounded behind the door, a protest, a curse. She took a single deep breath and, just as steps approached the door, she finally regained her senses and _ran_. 

When she tumbled out of the Floo and into her flat, Rose realised she was _still_ holding the bloody mug in her shaking hand. 

The image of him touching her, his dark eyes as they met hers, first with indifference then with shock kept replaying over and over and over in her mind until she thought her heart might just shatter… just as the mug she’d been holding a few seconds earlier, the remainders of which were now dribbling down a nearby wall.

* * *

Scorp had been bracing himself for an earth-shaking strop the next morning. Instead, the bearer of Good News had pulled a sickie for the first time since she’d started working there. 

She was replaced with Marnie, one of the Junior Editors. Marnie, while a good egg, didn’t exactly have the flair for positivity that Rose did. 

In her absence, the Prophet pickled in unhappiness.

Fine, _he_ pickled in unhappiness.

* * *

“As of Wednesday, we’ll be closed,” Eddie, the Prophet’s editor-in-chief said. “It’s candles only, no-magic, statute of calamity until the storm has passed. Whoever has an alternative place to stay outside of London is free to relocate in the interim.” 

All around her in the Prophet’s lobby, heads nodded dutifully and all the while, Rose was aware of the grey eyes boring holes on the back of her head. 

“Fletcher’s written a fine piece on the specifics," Eddie continued, "with all the relevant instructions from the Ministry. I suggest those of you who haven't yet take the time to read it.”

The second the announcement was over and done, Scorp caught up with her, trailing after her like a lost, apologetic puppy. An apologetic lost puppy who was far too close for comfort, far too warm, far too himself. Far too tall, too blonde, too _handsome_ , unfamiliar concern written all over his face.

“Are you feeling better?”

Familiar discomfort lodged itself in her throat and Rose forced the corners of her mouth upwards. “Yep.”

It had taken her a week to attain some semblance of normalcy again. She’d sputtered at the walls, torn one of her favourite books to shreds and cried on just about every single piece of furniture she owned.

And now she was fine… she just couldn’t bring herself to look at his face. 

"Are you going anywhere for the storm?"

He was making small talk of all things.

"Something like that."

She was planning on moving to her kitchen and baking approximately thirty batches of apple crumble and eating them by herself until she either died of an apple crumble overdose or just got over it.

Whatever _it_ was.

Who was she kidding, she knew exactly what it was. Great time for her therapist to go on holiday.

_The cow._

* * *

He’d _massively_ screwed up. The pessimist in him had spent the entire week telling him just that and he’d ignored it in favour of the most sensible explanation - that Rose had, in fact, been ill. 

The sensible explanation was starting to look very optimistic right about now.

He knocked at her door before opening it. 

“Yes?” She looked blankly over at him for a second before her eyes got back to the stacks of paper on her desk. “I’m busy catching up and figuring out what to take home so if you don’t mind --”

She waved a hand, the implied ‘Leave Me The Hell Alone’ loud and clear.

“I come bearing Good News.” 

Possibly the most pathetic olive branch ever offered, but still. Scorp walked into the familiar office and basked in the sunlight, immediately feeling his fraught nerves starting to recharge just by standing there close to her.

How was it that their offices stood side by side and yet hers was infinitely lighter? Were his windows dirty?

Before he could lay a hand on the excessively comfortable chair, it floated a few inches to the side, leaving him grasping nothing but air. He glanced over at Rose who had her wand on her hand and was giving him a strained affectation of a smile.

It lacked warmth.

“I’m busy,” she said, “so don’t make yourself comfortable.” 

There was a note of sharpness to her voice that made everything inside him ache. Stepping into her office usually felt like coming home, a home he didn't even know he had. 

It now felt like Malfoy Manor.

“Three of Manchester's supposed casualties were found alive under the debris,” he said finally, brow scrunched. “Whole family, mum, dad, kid, all alive and well.”

He’d been sitting on it for two days now, a) because he had better things to do than help Marnie skewer what little good news she was given and b) because he’d hoped to give them to Rose direct.

Instead of the grin he’d hoped for - pretty much took for granted, really - he was met with a blank stare. 

“Thanks,” she said, one of her eyebrows quirking upwards. "I’ll definitely look into it."

The second he left her office, he heard the _very_ telling click of a lock.

Alright, no. He now _knew_ for a fact that, even if she had been sick, she was also not particularly pleased with him at the moment.

Pissed was the word, really.

* * *

Rose glared at the articles Marnie had spent the last week writing. Most of them _were_ in fact good news, but the way she phrased them was… lacking. 

_'Shropshire Bakery sells rainbow cakes - pot of gold not included'._

Why the disclaimer? Rose had tried the damned cakes, they were better than any pot of gold. Why ruin it with reality?

_'Flourish and Blotts hosts a fundraiser for Dragon Pox victims.'_

'Victims'? You _never_ used the word 'victims' in Good News unless you were trying to be witty, you _always_ used 'survivors' or something to that effect.

Merlin this was a trainwreck. She stared at the piles of letters and parchment on her desk. A corner with familiar tight, rounded, impeccable handwriting caught her eye and Rose gingerly pulled it from under the past week’s shambles.

The thick envelope read 'Revolting Fluff You Missed, courtesy of Bad News'. 

Peace offering perhaps. Trading fluff for forgiveness sounded like a long shot. Rose shook the envelope and her eyes grew wide as a series of pictures fell from it on her desk.

Kneazle sleeping with a baby dragon - the note on the back read ' _self-explanatory_ '. 

Cute kid riding a broom - ' _Three-year-old breaks world record for tightest flying loop_ '. 

Three young adults, arms around each others' shoulders, awkwardly grinning at the camera before bursting into laughter - ' _Scottish Lads stumble on an antidote to complex poisons while high as a kite_ '. Additional commentary, ‘ _ha_ ’.

It just went on. And on. And on.

Girl crying with her arms wrapped around a large dog’s neck. ‘ _Ellie Harris reunites with the puppy her parents gave up for adoption after nine years when he recognises her voice across the street._ ’ An additional note, ' _Little wordy, but you'll work it_ '.

Each with further contacts. Each meticulously dated.

* * *

There was a rap at the door and Scorp braced himself. When the door didn’t open, he cleared his throat and let out a raspy “Come in”. 

She hovered. “Hi.”

“I’m assuming you found it,” he said, smiling smugly at her as he sat on the very edge of his desk. “I could hear you squealing from across the wall.”

There was a storm behind her blue eyes and, for a second, Scorp thought she was going to have at him. 

Instead, she threw herself in his arms.

“Thanks,” she croaked into his chest. “I needed that.”

Holding her was like snorting sunshine for Merlin’s sake. How was that _fair_? 

His arms settled hesitantly on her shoulders and he gave her back an awkward tap. “There, there...?”

She snorted and let go of him. “You’re rubbish at this.”

“This maybe,” he said, giving her a smirk, “but apparently not at compiling dangerously saccharine levels of fluff?” 

“Not gonna lie, I cried a little at 'Dog’s heart rate increases when the owner says _I love you_ ’.” 

“Simply revolting.” He nodded knowingly and hesitated before asking, “Are we good?”

Her eyes thundered for the briefest second… and then a smile pushed the clouds away. “Yeah. We’re good, Malfoy.”

She was clearly lying. Just like the quills, he knew this would _still_ come back to bite him on the arse - it was only a matter of ‘when’.

For now, however, he was fine with this.

* * *

The lights on the office flickered and Rose scolded, waving her wand and muttering a few incantations until they settled. 

Alright, where was she? ‘Baxter, a five-year-old barn-owl from Salisbury, received a commendation award for helping his owner raise the alarm when they took a very difficult tumble down the stairs. The Indomitable Baxter --’

The lights flickered again and Rose glared at them.

‘The Indomitable Baxter --”

Flick. Flick. _Flick_.

“Malfoy,” she yelled at the wall, “are your lights going wonky as well or do I need a new bulb?”

A muffled “Minute” resounded on the other side of the wall and Rose huffily got up to her feet. She met him just as he was stepping out of his office and they stared, first at each other and then at the lights that were flickering all over the empty office.

“Not just yours,” he said matter-of-factly. “My best guess is the storm arrived a little early.”

The pair of them walked quietly toward the window where, at a distance, dark clouds assembled. At its core a faint purple light fizzled with magical intent.

Rose’s heart fell to her feet. “ _No_.”

“Weather isn’t an exact science,” he said quietly. “Is no one else around?”

They gave the building a final sweep and found themselves alone.

“This is what we get for going the extra mile,” Rose grumbled. 

Scorp stopped in his tracks and turned toward the Floo Room. “We might still have time to Floo.” 

“I can walk,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not getting into a fireplace with that thing knocking at the door.”

One thing was misspeaking an address and ending up somewhere in Bath as a very confused - and very naked - couple gaped at you. 

Another thing entirely was having the magical carpet pulled from under your feet while you traversed the Ley Lines. Merlin only knew what would happen if the storm decided to draw magic at that exact moment. 

Weather, like Scorp had said, was temperamental.

He stubbornly lingered as she turned and she threw a glance over her shoulder at him. “Coming? We still have time --”

He snorted. “Are you suggesting I power-walk my way to _Wiltshire_?”

Rose, who had already been taking another few steps toward the door stopped and turned, shuffling alternatives in her mind. “You can go over to Al’s. I’m sure him and Melissa --”

“Al, Melissa and the _baby_ buggered off to The Burrow two days ago,” Scorp snorted. “They couldn’t risk being around with a child who can’t control their magic.”

She swallowed. “Yardley --”

“Yardley is working very, _very_ hard to become the next Mr Alistair Fawcett. If I pop by and steal his thunder,” and here he let out a small amused smirk, “he might just end me.”

“Kate --”

“France.”

“Gwen?”

“Italy, actually. Second honeymoon.”

It felt familiar, much like when he was shooting down her Good News. Except she knew exactly where this was going.

“ _Hotel_?”

“State of calamity, darling,” he said, giving her a sardonic little smile. “Tourism’s not exactly a priority.”

Rose stared at him, mouth opening and closing.

“I’m just poking fun, don’t worry.” His voice was soft as he caught up with her and herded her toward the door. “ _Obviously_ , I have an alternative.”

He smiled blithely and her heart sank. _Obviously_ , he didn't, of course he didn’t. 

“Do you?” She planted her heels firmly on the floor and he nearly toppled them over. “Last I heard, you were going to Barcelona.”

She’d heard him telling Daphne from Opinion all about his plans to go sightseeing, check out the Sagrada Familia, pop over to Casa Mila and overall just gawk at everything Gaudí.

He looked very pleased with himself, the wanker. “Eavesdropping?”

“Daphne’s a loud laugher,” Rose grumbled, gritting her teeth and pushing them forward. “Come on. I’m putting you up on the couch.”

His arm tightened around her shoulder and he stopped them. “I don’t want to --”

“Be a hassle?” Rose shrugged his arm away. “Then shut up about it.”

She felt like a child poking a finger in an electrical socket. On the one hand, she knew she shouldn't, on the other…

Rose pushed it down. It didn't matter.

* * *

The second Scorp walked into the door of her Muggle flat - something about rent being cheaper - he was buffeted on the face with a wave of Rose-ness. 

“Don’t mind the mess.” She dropped her keys on a bowl at the door and glared at him. “And if you poke fun at anything, _anything_ at all... you’ll be out on your arse.”

He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. 

Or fine, he could. At some point, he probably _would_. However, as of right _now_ he was far too fascinated to say anything at all. It was all soft pastels, yellows and pinks and blues. Flowers strewn about in colourful pots - plastic flowers, not real ones, which somehow only added to the vibe that was so _her_. Books haphazardly scattered in small piles on every available flat surface, small mismatched bookcases against the wall - like she kept buying more but somehow kept running out of room anyway.

If going into her office felt like home, this _was_ home. 

Rose was busy striking matches and lighting a series of candles across the room and, for the most part, keeping a wary eye on him. The electrical was still holding, but in the throes of the magical storm, it’d feel the same as any nasty Muggle one, so he figured it was prudent.

The most fascinating thing was the wall behind her desk, which was covered with newspaper clippings. Not fully wallpapered, just an explosion of articles of all shapes and sizes, carefully stuck to it with colourful pins. Some of it Good News, some of it Bad, sentences highlighted with fluorescent markers.

She deliberately walked over until she was standing next to him, arms crossed over her chest. “Favourite articles,” she offered tartly in lieu of an explanation. “Again, not a _word_.”

Scorp nodded blankly, stepping closer to the wall until his hand was brushing the familiar paper. Witch Weekly, The Prophet, Quibbler, Economist, New York Times, Le Monde. A couple of New Yorker covers, minimal, colourful affairs. 

Just then, he realised why she was so defensive: on that wall, among all the Greats, among carefully curated journalistic masterpieces… were two of _his_. 

His heart hammered in his chest as he glanced over his shoulder at her and she bit down on her lower lip.

Time held its breath.

“Favourite?” he repeated conversationally, ignoring the way his mouth had suddenly gone as dry as the Saharan Desert and the vice grip in his chest.

“Hmmhmm.” Rose’s features were carefully schooled. “No accounting for taste.”

His fingers gingerly traced the edges of his own articles. There were two or three sentences meticulously underlined in each one and Scorp’s breath hitched in his throat as he read his own words.

An elegant turn of phrase that he’d been singularly proud of. 

A literary side-eye that he’d laughed at for hours but figured would go largely unnoticed. 

A delicate sentence that had him tearing his hair because he was trying to be as sensitive as humanly possible.

Like she somehow had sifted through the articles, found everything that was _his_ and elected it as worthy of her fluorescent markers. 

All of a sudden it had become a little hard to breathe in this room that was all _her_ ... but where _he_ was also stripped naked for the whole world to see. Scorp opened and closed his mouth, feeling supremely uncomfortable.

There was no end to his relief when Rose snorted and said, “I hope you’re into crumble.”

Which, considering how she’d just hunted down his soul and plastered it on her wall like a trophy, sounded like the most insipid consideration in the entire world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I was supposed to be writing either Witch Slap or Spectacularly Stupid but this sort of /happened/ the other day and when I read it over it was far too good not to continue. Chapter two is almost done and will be up sooner rather than later and it's not meant to be more than maybe 3, at most 4 chapters long.
> 
> Also, the chameleon dragons story is real - not the dragon part, but everything else. Apparently, a breed of chameleon went MIA for a hundred years only to be found chilling in a Madagascar Hotel Garden. The news about dog's hearts is also real and there are countless stories of brave puppies and pets saving their owners' lives by entering action and of heroic K-9 deeds. I've been trolling goodnewsnetwork a lot lately for this and it's despicable how happy I felt writing most of this.
> 
> As usual, give me a shout, let me know what you like, love, hate et cetera so I can feast on external approval and use it to fuel further writing pursuits. 
> 
> Love, Maria ❤️


	2. Chapter 2

Rose was having a hard time keeping it together in the face of… whatever it was that was happening with Scorp. 

“You’re going to have to stop gaping at some point,” she said, placing the still steaming tin of pudding between them. 

Merlin, now he was gaping at the spoon.

“Your spoons don’t match.” 

There was a crease between his eyebrows and he sounded terribly distressed like it had never occurred to him that such an aberration might occur in nature. 

“They don’t,” she agreed with a laugh, sliding a burning spoonful of crumble into her mouth and possibly burning the ceiling of her mouth in the process. “Aghhh, worth it.” She sniggered at him and rested her cheek against her hand. “This is how the other 99% lives, mate.”

He dug his mismatched spoon into the crumble and pointed out, “Al’s spoons match.”

Honestly, she was right about ready to crumble _him_ if he didn’t stop looking around like everything was a petri dish oddity. He wasn’t doing it unkindly, but she could feel him silently judging _everything_. 

“Al doesn’t live on a writer’s stipend. Only way I could afford all this largesse,” she said, waving an indulgent arm at her tiny domain, “was by telling the landlord I would fix up the place myself. Which I did... with magic. On the plus side, he stopped treating me like a helpless little missy.” 

He shoved a thoughtful spoonful of the crumble into his mouth with a half-smile. “I see.” 

She shrugged. “You don’t live alone either. I’m guessing not for the money…?” His eyes narrowed at her and she quirked an eyebrow at him. “What, you can traipse into my life and pass judgement all over my poor spoons but I can’t pry a little?”

“Maybe.”

The last of her ice-cream melted in her mouth and she gave him a crooked grin. “Please, do share.”

“My Grandmother’s a bit… _confused_ ,” he enunciated, letting the euphemism cynically roll off his tongue. Like he was harbouring a secret contempt for the word. “Has been since my Grandfather passed.”

Rose nodded, her spoon hanging upside down from her mouth.

Apparently encouraged by her silence, he continued, “My Mum can’t stand her and Dad has a particularly hard time seeing her when she’s on one of her more… _bewildered_ days.” He frowned at the crumble on his spoon. “I keep telling them they should put her in a home but… apparently ‘that’s not what _we_ do’.”

Rose nodded again, far too familiar with the concept. 

“So you commute,” she said, mouth pressing into a thin line.

He let out the most jaundiced smile yet. “She thinks I’m my dad. Keeps begging me not to marry my mother which, I might add, turns Oedipal love into a far more private type of hell.”

The laugh she let out would’ve given awkwardness a run for its money. “I have _no_ idea how to answer that.”

“You don’t have to,” he said simply, pulling his own spoon out of his mouth between tight lips. He sneered. “I get a perverse sort of pleasure making people uncomfortable with it.”

Rose’s eyes narrowed. “Eat your damned pudding, mate. See if you can’t wash down all that bitter.”

“The bitter needs something stronger,” he said, quirking an eyebrow at her. “Preferably of the alcoholic persuasion.”

“First you raid my home, then you loot my pudding, _then_ you set your wily sights on my liquor.” She sighed dramatically, pulling her stool away from the counter and opening the cabinet underneath. “Is there no end to the madness?”

He got up to his feet and peered over her shoulder at the assorted bottles, breath warm on her ear.

“Undetermined of the present.” He threw her some serious side-eye and then looked away, smiling to himself. “Sight unseen.”

 _Bugger_.

* * *

She’d tossed a blanket his way and offered him an oversized sweater that was far too large to just be hers. He didn’t ask, she didn’t tell. Her couch was the stuff of dreams, ugly and terribly comfortable.

The storm grew nearer, knocking down lampposts and trees in its wake. They were barely at the start of it and already the world was rattling like a rickety matchbox, mayhem outside the safe haven that was her little flat.

Scorp found himself almost indifferent to it: there were other far more pressing matters demanding his attention.

Rose was sitting on a window seat, folded legs hidden from sight inside an oversized sweater of her own, a wine glass twirling in her hand as she watched the rain pouring out, a smile on her face. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said quietly, brow resting against the windowpane, beautiful as no girl had ever been before and possibly never would.

“What sort of thing?”

The entire experience felt like a childhood memory of comfort and warmth - except for the alcohol, of course, and the fact that he wanted to throw her against the nearest wall and kiss that smile off her face.

Details of course. A mere footnote on the situation at hand, the sort that didn’t really matter because nobody really reads footnotes.

She glanced over at him and smiled softly, eyes crinkling as she shuffled to make herself comfortable. “Something… I’ll like.”

“Making heavy demands.” He swished his own glass around and took a swallow, flinging his legs over the back of the couch so he could have an unobstructed view of her. “Let’s see…”

She added, “ _Don’t_ make it sad,” as a sort of an afterthought. 

Like he was incapable of anything but.

“It was implied,” he said, letting out a bitter laugh of his own. He thought for a few minutes, eyes glued to the window and took a final sip of his drink before going for it. “Alright, this isn’t sad. If you run when you’re in the rain, you’ll get _less_ wet.” He was delighted at her indignant look. “No, hear me out. When you’re running, you get swatted with rain from the front as well as the top so one would figure running might make things worse.”

A small crease showed on her forehead. “And you’re telling me running is always less… wetting.”

“You’re eloquent when you’re squiffy.”

Rose chuckled. “You’re either far too eloquent or not squiffy enough.” Her eyes met his, colour tinting her cheeks. “I _did_ like it, by the way. Practical and not at all sad. Nice even.”

Her smile was perfection. If his quill were here, it’d have written a treatise on it by now.

“Practical advice is never _not_ nice,” he said, sniggering at the horrified look she immediately threw him. 

“I swear to _Merlin_ if you start rhyming, I will --”

“-- kick me out?” he offered sceptically, tilting his chin at the maelstrom roaring out the window. “You’re far too nice a person for that.”

Her blue eyes softened and she smiled. “I was actually going to say ‘ply you with the hard liquor until you can’t see straight, much less rhyme’.”

“Hard liquor as opposed to what?” Scorp snorted, tilting his glass. “This flimsy firewhiskey?”

“Scorp,” she said, removing her legs from under the sweater, setting her feet down on the floor and giving him a grave, stern McGonagall-circa-2025 type of look. “There will be none of that rhyming debauchery under my roof.”

“Only salubrious alcoholism,” he proffered, holding up his glass to her. 

The corner of her mouth twitched upwards. “Yes.”

“You have a lot of rules,” he getting up to his feet and dragging his blanket behind him. He stalked closer to sit on the space her legs had vacated. She was watching him warily and Scorp laughed, leaning primly back against the window. “Calm down, Weasley. No impure intentions here whatsoever.”

He was lying of course. At this point, he was a cocktail of complete inebriation and impure intentions… and he wasn’t even drunk. 

“Good,” she said, moving to drape her legs over his lap and sheltering the pair of them with his blanket, as if it might shield them from the world. “Because if you’re looking for a notch, I suggest you go find it elsewhere.”

His heart quivered in his chest and Scorp felt uncomfortable all over again. Time and time again under her blue eyes he felt far too close and not close enough.

In the end, there was no debauchery of any kind, rhyming or otherwise. He wasn't about to pounce on the person who was keeping a room over his head, especially since apparently she had very little intention of pouncing back.

That feeling of discomfort kept popping up again and again and _again_ , viscerally painful the closer she got, agonizing and excruciating whenever she pulled away. 

* * *

Buggering storm. 

She should’ve left when she’d had the chance. Time and distance had erased the last one from her mind, played it down. Convinced her it wasn’t so bad. 

It was getting closer, Rose noted, downing the last of her glass before refilling it and downing another half. She could already feel the tingle on her skin, every hair raised with anticipation, her stomach wriggling with fear.

Like her body knew it was prey.

Every thunder, even the ones far away, made her tingle with a faint echo of magic static. It was still pretty tolerable, but her body was now being reminded with awful accuracy of what it _would_ be like.

As the storm raged they moved further from the window - or fine, Rose moved further from the window and Scorp followed.

“You know, you don’t have to awkwardly tailgate me,” she said, pouring some more wine into her glass and staring at him as he topped up his own. “You have the lay of the land by now.”

She winced when a nearer thunder struck and Scorp’s eyebrow furrowed upwards.

“You’re giving me _carte blanche_?”

She pulled a face and let out a little snort at the obvious shock plastered in his face. “What, you don’t let your guests roam free?”

Scorp snorted. “Of course _not_. Grandma is convinced guests steal the silver.” He leaned against a nearby wall in a way that made her pulse race. “Specifically teaspoons for some reason.”

She needed to be far drunker for this.

“Since my mismatched spoons are a dime a dozen,” she said, glaring at her glass and shuddering as another static jolt climbed up her spine, “and there’s no silver to speak of, _mi casa is su casa_ for the time being. At will, Malfoy.” 

“Do you mean strip to my underpants and sing poor renditions of the Weird Sisters?”

“ _No!_ ” Rose choked on the wine she was sipping and covered her mouth and nose with her hand. She didn’t miss the look of delight on his face at the situation, and reached out for her wand to accio a napkin… only to let her hand drop for the thousandth time as she remembered she couldn’t. 

“I honestly can’t picture you singing, much less poorly and in your underpants.” She opened a nearby cabinet and dabbed at the stain on her shirt. He rested his cheekbone against the doorframe with a smirk and Rose’s heart thumped quietly as she looked over at him and added an incredulous, “ _Really_?”

“ _No_ , of course not.” He snorted and downed the last of his glass with a smug look. “They’re _excellent_ renditions of the Weird Sisters. My mum tells me I sing like an angel.”

“She _does_?”

“ _Of course she doesn’t_ ,” he said, pulling a face and shaking his head. “Keep with the program, love.”

“Bugger off, Malfoy.”

“I’m doling out _beautiful_ sarcasm here and you’re missing out on it because you keep drooling over the image of me singing into a hairbrush... in my underwear.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Her therapist had AdviceTM precisely for this sort of situation. Checking in, letting go of judgement, using ‘I’ statements, all of which felt terribly dangerous right about now.

* * *

It was a fascinating amalgamation of books. On the bookshelves, collecting dust, literary masterpieces. Closer at hand, terribly pastel coloured books that looked like they’d been shat out by a rainbow. 

Scorp read tonelessly aloud from a random page, “‘ _Hands plunged down my back to cradle my arse as he ground into me_ ’?” 

Rose, who was just stepping in the room became beet red and looked like she wanted the ground to swallow her whole. “Scorp…”

He tutted and leaned back against the couch, continuing, “‘ _Only sex, that’s all it can be’_ . Well, now we have _drama_. Wonder what comes next.”

“Put _down_ the book, Malfoy.” 

“I will do no such thing.” He twirled the book around and looked at the candy cover. “I’m invested now.” She approached him with grim determination and he held out a hand to keep her at bay. “No, no, no. You told me to make myself at home. _Mi casa es tu casa_ , _mis_ books are _tus_ books, I assumed.” 

“I also told you that if you poked fun at anything, you’d be out on your arse.”

She looked like she was about ready to cry which was reasonable because books were deeply personal affairs and the sanctity of them was not to be mocked - even if it was terribly tempting to do so. 

Scorp sighed, and quirked an eyebrow at her before saying, “Would it make you feel less self-conscious if I told you I read my way through _Seventy Ways To Yell ‘Arghh’_ just yesterday?”

Not ‘saying’, confessing, really. _Seventy Ways to Yell ‘Argh’_ wasn’t the sort of thing people _admitted_ to reading. However, at this moment in time and coming face to face with her embarrassed-going-on-hurt look, he’d gladly have admitted to any and all of his literary shame.

It had the intended effect. “You _what_?!” 

She looked shocked and disappointed and amazed at the same time.

His reputation taking a nosedive for the sake of her feelings, would the infamy never cease?

He nodded blithely, draping his legs up over the back of the couch and tapping her book against the cushion. “Trust me, I’m in no position to judge… whatever this is.”

“You read _troll smut_?!”

“First of all,” he said snootily, “it’s a celebrated work shedding light into an otherwise neglected and unknown culture, so don’t tear it down until you’ve read it.” Scorp snorted and offered her a crooked smirk. “But also the answer is ‘yes’.”

“It’s _garbage_!” Rose let herself fall on the other end of the couch and took a fortifying sip of her wine. “It’s… it’s _awful_!”

“It’s also surprisingly entertaining, which you’d know if you’d actually _read_ it.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds, him smiling innocently, her still trying to wrap her mind around the concept that he read crack fiction.

“You’re taking the piss,” she said finally, shaking her head. “There’s no way --”

“It’s in my bag.” 

She gaped back at him and her eyes flickered to his bag before they settled on him before they went right back to the bag. 

“ _No_.”

“Oh, yes,” he said sweetly, walking over to retrieve the aforementioned book and handing it to her. “In the flesh - or rather, the page.”

“I can’t --” She took it from his hand and turned it in her hands, delightedly cradling it to her chest in a way that made him feel almost jealous. “Oh, Merlin.”

Scorp rolled his eyes. “Stop being a judgy pest,” he said, laying back down on his previous, terribly comfortable position and holding her book open on his chest. “Or I’ll start reading this one aloud, see how your literary taste fares.”

“You’re not _really_ reading it, are you?”

“Why not?” 

He hadn’t intended to, but now he definitely was - if only to find out why she was looking so delightfully flushed. He let out a mild snort and pulled the blanket over his legs, relishing on the fact that it smelled like her - like bloody sunshine - and stubbornly opening it to the first page.

Rose’s eyes were wide and her eyebrows so high up they were practically hidden in her hairline. 

He smiled to himself and read on, “' _I glanced down at the text while the light was red'--_ ” Brow furrowed momentarily. “What text? And what light?”

She had leaned back against the opposite cushion, legs sprawled over the empty couch seat his legs weren’t using and was silently staring at his book with a ‘will I won’t I’ type of look.

“If you read it,” he enticed with a sing-song voice, “you can tear it to shreds properly.” He snorted after a few seconds and then added, “You’ll like it, probably.” She looked at him like he’d just offered her a deeply personal offence and he let out a strained laugh. “Not the troll smut, _obviously_ , but the rest of it’s rather palatable. _Heartwarming_ even. A story of love and outlandish, borderline silly violence in pursuit of it.”

“You’re _baiting_ me.”

She still looked suspicious and Scorp’s heart twanged in his chest. “Maybe a little.”

“You really liked it?” And after a few seconds, “Really _really_?”

The way she was looking at him now was far too personal, far too intimate. All of this was like some sort of bizarre literary foreplay that would lead to absolutely nothing at all and would have him tearing out his hair for months to come as he remembered her sitting on the edge of the couch, biting her lip and reading his book.

“‘Like’ is a strong word, but I stand by it,” he said, pointedly looking away from her. “Give it a go.”

Every single time she snorted or let out a shocked laugh at the pages, his heart felt like it’d been handed a punch. 

He was far too distracted figuring out what bit she was at in his book, what line, what _everything_ to properly remember to poke fun at hers.

* * *

It was a _terrible_ book, Rose thought with a smile as she lowered Scorp’s legs and draped two or three blankets over him. He was snuffed, just like the candles that had died through the night, exhausted to the end of their wick.

* * *

There was no light to signal the dawn, nothing but dusk and the slamming of rain against the windows. Lightning persisted, falling far too often and far too close for comfort.

Rose tentatively stuck her head into the living room to find Scorpius already sitting at the window seat and scowling outside. His hair was wet and his clothes were rumpled from sleeping in them and he looked as stormy as the quagmire raging outside. 

"Good morning, sunshine," she cooed. "Sleep well?"

He groaned in return. "I keep forgetting you're a _morning person_."

"Whereas _I_ never forget you're a grouch."

She crossed the distance between them with practised steps that were far happier than she was feeling after a wretched night of twisting and turning in her bed. To add insult to injury, her feet had been cold and, without magic, there were no warming spells to keep them toasty. 

Didn't really matter how many pairs of socks she stuffed on them when at her core she still felt… cold.

She shook a smile onto her face and carefully handed him a mug of piping hot coffee. "Here you go," she said, taking in his wet hair, evidence of a shower. "Did you find the towels?"

"Yeah.” He scrunched his nose. “It was a… complicated process. Half burning and half freezing before I figured out those sadistic nozzles." 

The thought of Scorp hissing as he fought against her famously finicky shower was sort of amusing and Rose's smile grew. "You get used to it."

He gave her a cynical smile and took a sip of his coffee. "Great brew. Best yet, probably." He shook his head and frowned at the cup. “I have no idea how you do it, especially _sans_ magic.”

No, okay, _that_ was amusing.

"It’s _instant_ coffee," she said, her chest shaking with laughter. "This one’s the very _worst_ instant coffee too, it's like… bottom-shelf, scraping-the-barrel instant coffee. I had to fish it out of the very back of the cupboard." He stared blankly back at her and Rose sat on the very edge of the couch, still quaking with laughter. “It’s not even a _brew_ , it’s literally ground coffee in a packet that you pour hot water into and then stir.”

He was staring down at his cup like it had somehow betrayed him. 

“Your snooty taste buds are into _naff_ coffee, oh Merlin.” Rose brushed a delighted hand through her hair. “And here I was tinkering with the blend at work --”

“How _do_ you know how I take my coffee?”

The look he gave her made her heart stop. Too _close_.

She let out a laugh and stood up to her feet. “What do you mean? We’ve been working together for --”

“I was three days in and you already knew. S’not just me either, is it?” 

He said it like it was _odd_ and Rose’s heart put up a defensive little shield. “My Nan always said the easiest way to make someone happy was to notice and remember how they took their coffee.”

So she did. A small gesture, really, that cost nothing and asked for nothing in return.

He stared at her for a second, eyes narrowed and then looked pointedly away. “Fair.” 

She clung to her coffee with slightly shaking hands and took a few aimless steps away from him. 

“I didn’t mean it as a _bad_ thing,” he said with a scowl and took another sip of his common-as-muck coffee. “And it _does_ make me happy.”

He didn’t look it or sound it. 

_Why do you say things like that?_ was what she wanted to ask. It was like he’d missed the childhood class on ‘smile for happy, frown for sad’.

“I have fresh clothes for you if you want,” was what she said instead, offering him a sunny smile that was in stark contrast with what she was feeling. “Boyfriend spoils. Mostly shirts, I think...” He was now giving her the once over, the same petri-dish oddity look that he’d given her house at first and her heart raced. “ _What_?”

He shook his head and let out a small snort, getting up to his feet. “Lead the way. I think I need another shower, I stink already.”

She did just that, heart shuddering as she led him into her bedroom.

* * *

Her bedroom was surprisingly bereft of personality and Scorp almost felt disappointed. There was no colour about it, no soul, like it was someone else’s entirely.

“You weren’t kidding.”

Half her wardrobe was male shirts and hoodies, like someone of the male persuasion was actually living there. Rose shook her head, her hand brushing through them.

 _Boyfriend spoils_.

It sent his heart into disarray. All of her did, really, but this was the sort of hopeless dismay that had him scowling until his face hurt. One thing was hearing it, another thing entirely was seeing it: anger, jealousy, possessiveness knit themselves into a cosy scarf around his neck that felt a little like a noose, a miserable little piece of gallows humour that the universe was keen on rubbing his nose on. 

In the bubble they shared at work, she'd almost felt... _his_ or, if not his at the very least not _someone else's_.

“I keep meaning to get rid of it all,” she said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, her smile never faltering. “Long overdue.”

The implied ‘breakup’ had his heart straight up laughing and it was hard to keep his face from following suit. “Why don’t you?” 

She let out a small snort in return and waved a dismissive hand, the same ‘Leave Me The Hell Alone’ from last time. 

“Blue or grey?” She held two shirts to him and nodded at the second. “Definitely grey. Goes with your eyes.”

His hand held hers in place over the shirt for a second before she seamlessly slipped away. 

“Do you need underwear?” She pulled a face and started fishing through drawers. “Of course you do. Not sure about pants, there are some but you’re taller, you’ll look --”

Again and again. _Home_.

“-- ridiculous,” she finished, triumphantly tossing a pair of underpants at him. “There you go.”

“Why did you break it off?” 

He personally couldn’t imagine what breed of armpit-licking wanker would let _her_ get away without a fight. 

She let out an incredulous chuckle through her smile. “I _didn’t_.” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently I’m too, what was the word --” She stopped to toss him a pair of socks and Scorp's jaw set at the obvious pain on her face. “-- _shallow_.” 

Clearly, the problem was far more insidious than just an armpit-licking wanker. 

_Clearly_ , they were talking about a dangerous escapee from a psychiatric institution, possibly the kind that molested small furry animals. At the very least a catatonic blight upon civilized society, a myopic excrement stain of existential sub-mediocrity.

Anger really _did_ bring out the lyrical side of him.

“Shallow,” he repeated acerbically, getting down to catch the socks he’d missed. “You.” 

“Seems like it. I get it, I mean, I write fluff pieces for a living.” The laughter she let out was far too brittle for his liking, every chuckle a morsel of broken mirth. “Not exactly peak journalism. I’m not out there in Syria reporting The Truth--” 

“I’m sorry,” Scorp interrupted her, shaking his head, still trying to wrap his mind around the inane words coming out of her mouth. “You mean to tell me this--” _egregiously narcissistic exhibition of genetic deficiency_ “-- ex-boyfriend of yours said _what_?”

Well, he knew what _he_ was doing after they got out of this. All he needed was a shovel and a discreet plot of land hidden somewhere in the woods. 

“Real charmer, I know.” Her brow scrunched up and she tilted her head at him. “Don’t give me that look, I know you think it too. You may be nicer about it --”

“ _What_?!”

“-- and not actually outright say it, but…” Her eyebrows scrunched and she shook her head with another little laugh that sounded too much like his own. “Doesn’t matter.” She gently took her mug from his hand and walked over to the door. “I’m getting us a refill. If you’re going to shower again, get a move on it. I need --”

He had no idea what she needed because she was gone before she finished the sentence. 

Maybe he wouldn’t need that discreet plot in the woods after all. If he ever met the wanker, there’d be nothing left _to_ bury.

* * *

Her therapist would’ve told her now would be a good time to say the words aloud, a little ‘I’ statement that would help.

_I am upset._

But Rose Weasley didn’t do ‘upset’. She wasn’t entirely sure _how_ not the regular kind. Sadness was uncomfortable and best left ignored - until it came pouring out all at once in an angry cyclone that tore everything in its wake.

It wasn’t anger, it was never anger. 

It was bottled up sadness. Disappointment. Disillusionment.

The personification of all those emotions was staring right back at her, a scowl on his face.

“Want one?” she asked as she poured herself a much-needed glass of wine. “I know it’s early but,” and here she tilted her chin at the window, “it’s going to get worse soon.”

He shook his head and leaned on his arm against the doorframe. 

Rose let out a little huffy laughter into her glass of red. “How’s the shirt?”

The grey shirt had been a favourite of hers and on him, it was… well. She’d given it to Ethan a month or two before their untimely separation and he’d always claimed it was off. On Scorp it fit like a glove. Perfect. Like it had been made for him somehow.

“I’m filching it when this is over,” he said simply, letting out a laugh that warmed her more than the wine ever could. “While we’re on the topic of shirts--”

“You can take them all, if you want,” Rose said, rolling her eyes. “You’d be doing me a favour.”

“Thanks, but that wasn’t it,” he said, getting over to her and taking her glass away. “I was going to say that some _shirts_ are incredibly stupid.” 

Rose stared back at him. What in the world…?

“The very word says it all, you just take the ‘r’ and that’s what they are.” He took a swallow of her glass and grimaced before handing it back to her. “Just because a daft shirt keeps finding excuses as to why it won’t fit, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me. Right?”

This was either Scorp laying it thick on the self-image issues, or they weren’t talking about shirts at all.

“And just because one shirt says my shoulders are too broad--”

Definitely no lack of self-love there.

“-- it doesn’t mean all other shirts share the same opinion. In fact, most shirts think that shirt is a proper wanker. A putrid, cretinous, backwards-swine of a shirt. ”

She felt a smile, a genuine, non-forced, bonafide smiling smile grow on her face.

“You don’t say,” she said, carefully keeping her eyes trained on her glass so she wouldn’t give her heart any more reasons to explode. “Those are very strong feelings to have toward a piece of clothing.”

“I have a few choice words for that shirt. A lot of them, actually.” A hand rested on top of her head and gave it a gentle squeeze of sorts before turning to the living room. He stopped right before the door and threw her a smirk over his shoulder. “You know the shirt’s wrong, right?”

“I know.”

“ _Do you_?”

She could see the annoyance simmering in his face and she forced a smile on her face. 

“Most of the time.”

He sighed and stalked back into the kitchen. From the way he poured himself a glass, he’d apparently decided that it wasn’t far too early to have a drink. 

“Everyone _loves_ being miserable. It’s easy to complain and mope and spin a sad little story. Any idiot can do it.” Scorp rolled his eyes and let out a scornful little chuckle that had nothing to do with the words coming out of his mouth. “You’re the smile on people’s coffee break, lost between the scowl on page 1 and the frown on page 3.” 

He took a swig of his drink and grimaced. 

“Don’t let a confounded shirt convince you that’s somehow _less than_.”

* * *

They’d started out in remote corners of the couch and somehow converged on the end furthest away from the window, huddled close in silent agreement, their discarded books forgotten on the table. Rain, wind and magic buffeted the glass pane and she squeezed further into him, their eyes glued to the cyclone raging outside. 

From a purely logical point of view, this should’ve felt far more foreign but, in the present situation, all she could do was thank the Fates that he was there. 

That she wasn’t alone.

“I can _feel_ the damned thing,” Rose whispered. “Like it’s crawling under my skin.”

In general, magic was something you had but didn’t really notice, sort of like your toes. Now, however, just like when you stubbed one and became acutely aware of its presence, Rose’s blood was screaming in her veins, tingling with irritation, making her fidget at the itch she couldn’t scratch.

Scorp nodded. “You don’t say.”

Far too ironic, far too close, far too handsome. 

Far too _dangerous_.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” His tone was steady and she could hear the mocked mimicry in his voice. “Something _I’ll_ like.”

“How can you...” Words died at a stronger thunder and she almost hissed as a wave of static jolted through her. “How can you even _sarcasm_ ? Aren’t you _uncomfortable_?”

Only mordant laughter in return. “What do _you_ think?”

She struggled to look at him and met the usual jeer. 

“I have no idea,” she said honestly, rubbing an agonizing arm. It wasn’t so much pain as… pins and needles. “I’m going a little batty myself but you seem --”

“Fine?”

Again with the laughter, Merlin. 

“Yes, fine,” she said spitefully. “I’m --”

Another thunder clapped and Rose winced. 

Warm arms wrapped around her, pulling her closer. “I’m _not_ fine,” he clarified, pulling the blankets further around them before his arms engulfed her again. His chin rested on her shoulder and he let out a bitter little chuckle. “And I’m _really_ glad you didn’t kick me out.”

Rose bit down on her lower lip. “Then why --”

A flash of light, followed by a rumble shook the apartment and Rose clambered further into him. 

“Small talk, darling.” He laughed his acidic little laugh into her neck. “Figured it might help.”

Rose looked over at him and his lips curled upwards in a faint smile that was equal measures of caustic and vulnerable. 

“I’ve never been around for one of these,” he continued, shaking his head against her shoulder. “My parents and I always go away. _Far_ away. I always figured it was much ado about nothing but --”

He briefly flinched as another thunder struck and Rose’s heart stirred with protectiveness.

“-- apparently I was wrong.” 

Under the blanket, her fingers traced his arm all the way to his hand. Unlike the rest of him, it was cold and clammy and practically jumped at her touch. Her fingers twined into his and closed around them in a fist.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said quietly. “I’d be miserable if you weren’t.”

She leaned back against his chest and stretched her legs over the couch. 

A thunder clapped and he let out another of his sarcastic chuckles. “You’re not miserable because _I'm_ here?”

“I _am_ miserable.” Quietly, after a few seconds, she added, “But less.”

* * *

Her small hand tugged at his with every thunder, every noise, effectively pulling his arms closer around her. Their legs were tangled on the couch, the back pillows having been relegated to the floor for extra room. 

He probably shouldn’t feel this happy, given the circumstances and the fact that every few minutes their skin would crawl with magical psoriasis… but he was. 

Merlin, _was_ he. 

“Ask me again,” she said quietly after a few minutes of silent clinging.

“Ask again what?”

“Something you don’t know,” she said, giving his hand a reflexive a tug as another flash of light hit and the nervous crawl itched under their skin. “Something you’ll like.”

“Something _I’ll_ like?” He snorted. “Oh, please, _do_ make it depressing Miss Sunshine.”

She stiffened against him and let out a small chuckle. “Well, that’s easy then.” Her voice became very small and she continued, “Baby panda died. His mum sat on him.”

 _Bugger_. Scorp had hoped she’d missed it entirely. 

He rested the side of his head against hers, eyes closing. “I know.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Darling --” His arms tightened around her and he pressed a small kiss to the side of her head. Just the one. A footnote. “-- no, of course I didn’t tell you.”

“It didn’t even make the Bad News.” 

He shook his head. “It didn’t. Got pushed down by all the tragedies. Limited space.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

 _Because it would make you sad._

“I had to find out from _Fletcher_ ,” she continued, turning to look at him and looking oh so betrayed. “I don’t want to get my Bad News from _Fletcher_.”

“How’s it any different than getting them from me?”

She struggled out of his arms and looked at him like he was insane. “Fletcher’s a snivelling parasite who feasts on people’s misery.”

“And I’m not?” He was torn between feeling amused and pleased. “You always said --”

“I know what I said.” Rose scowled, propping herself up with an (extremely painful) elbow to his ribs. “You might be a dopamine deficient prat, but you don’t --”

“Capitalise on misery? Crusade for angst? Obfuscate all that’s good in this world?”

She snorted and shook her head. “No, you do that too. It’s more...” She hesitated for a second and then her mouth curled into a small smile. “It’s just easier when it comes from someone close, you know?” 

It was good that lightning chose that exact instant to strike so he had a reason to feel the way he was feeling. Raw. Exposed, a little like he had when he’d found himself exhibited on her wall. 

“ _Close_?”

“Aren’t we?” Her face fell. “I thought… I just…”

Everything inside him crawled and it had nothing to do with the storm. 

He should rip the band-aid and get it over and done with. Snog her and either get shagged or get smacked and _move on_. 

“Of _course_ we are,” was what came out instead, and he pressed a kiss to her head - this one hesitant and not a footnote at all. “Can’t think of anyone I’d rather face Armageddon with.”

He should hand her in to the proper authorities - the smile she gave him was clearly the reason for those melting ice caps everyone was fussing about. It thawed every single cold piece of him and set it on fire and Scorp felt his cheeks heating up.

Oh, the indignity. Oh, the abasement. 

Here he was, _still_ wrapped around her little finger. And it was only getting worse.

* * *

He’d fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder, like an overtired child. 

How he could sleep, Rose wouldn’t be able to tell you. Outside, the storm growled, sucking the magic out of everything and everyone, heading straight for Diagon Alley where it would feast on every building, every semi-permanent spell, every person.

Circe hadn’t been this bad, Rose thought, mouth pressed into a thin line. Neither had Morgana or Medea. 

Ceridwen was a 9.2 in the Podmore scale and it kept on growing.

Thunder struck and Scorp fidgeted against her. Rose’s hand moved over to his hair and stroked it softly and he leaned into her touch like a cat. 

"Scorp?"

Nothing.

Rose carefully untangled herself from him and stopped just as he let out a slight little protesting moan. She stopped until his breathing slowed again and resumed plucking herself from his arms. Sidestepped his torso, nearly tripping in her effort not to wake him.

Looking at him asleep made Rose's heart ache. The snide was all but gone replaced with something vulnerable that everything in her yearned to protect at all costs.

She assembled all the blankets she could find and wrapped them around him. When she was tucking in his feet, he stirred, smiling at her faintly from the recesses of his sleep and mumbling a small ' _thanks_ ' before his eyes closed again.

If the awake Scorp was dangerous, the asleep one made her want to throw all caution to the wind. If toying with the cynical version of him was playing with matches, staring at the soft boy inside was like being caught in a wildfire.

* * *

He'd wished she'd stay, willed it like nothing else before.

And she was gone anyway.

He was all alone in her too comfortable couch, with her too comfortable blankets that smelled comfortably like her. There was a pervasive, uncanny feeling that something was missing, like when you misplaced your wand or forgot the cauldron you'd left simmering.

Terrifying really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this story is clearly an excellent way to flex my vocabulary. Thanks to EnolaScamander, HildaCobble and Anna_Elephant for their super kind words on the first chapter, y'all are bamf ❤️Here we are with chapter 2! Chapter 3 coming soonish, I just need to actually, y'know, write it. 
> 
> (Quotes from Rose's book are from Abby Jimenez's Friendzone. Solid chick lit, guys, I actively recommend.)
> 
> Have a great one!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ( Changed the rating to M for smutty purposes. 😂 Idk, this is all new to me. If you're not into the smutty bits, you can just skip it, I added an A/N to the text so you can just... pretend it got faded to black? Anyway, enjoy I guess? ❤️ )

“Scorp.”

A whisper. 

“Scorp?”

Scorp grimaced as he blinked his eyes open and then scowled at the face of a far-too-close Rose crouching next to the couch. 

“ _What_?” he asked tartly, blinking as he tried to figure out what was happening. After a brief sidebar with his brain, he finally added, “Are you alright?”

She shook her head. 

There was a pillow clasped in her arms and she had a sort of pleading look on her face. 

He knew the look, it was the ‘please don’t be a dick’ look which, as usual, had him strung by the heartstrings and tottering around to her tune. And in this particular instance, her tune sounded a lot like 'I need an inert teddy bear to cling to'.

Would the nerviness never cease?

He stole an inquiring glance in the general direction of her room, the obvious question as to why not share the much larger bed --

Oh, right. _That_ was why. Rose’s eyes followed his and her lips pressed together, an unspoken conversation having place.

Beds were real. Couches were footnotes. 

One thing was cuddling on a couch. Sheet territory, however, was far too dangerous.

He sighed and grabbed the back cushions off the couch, consigning them to the floor to make room, aware that his back was going to be screaming bloody murder in the morning. He was far too old to be sleeping on couches, much less sharing them with uncertainly-platonic co-workers with the _bluest_ damned eyes he’d ever seen.

And fine, he wasn’t _that_ old, but he’d been too old for this since he’d been _born_. 

He split the blankets in half and handed her one. She looked at it like he was giving her something of a radioactive nature and he rolled his eyes. “Unless you want to spend the night playing tug-of-war, I suggest you take them.”

Mostly because he’d win. Partly because it minimised physical contact. 

“You really are a grouch,” she said, pulling the blankets to her chest and taking a tentative seat next to him. “Is it really alright if...?”

Her hair was tied in that insane knot she sometimes made of it, the one that was held up by nothing but sheer willpower. Her eyes were too bright, her pyjama choices should be banned and he was going to spend the night thinking about dead kittens to keep himself from unfortunate accidents.

No, it wasn’t alright. It was what he imagined torture would feel like.

“What do _you_ think?” he grumbled, tugging his blankets closer and pointedly placing a pillow between them anyway. She snuggled up to him until there was absolutely no room between them, which pretty much immediately justified the pillow because she was warm and soft and terribly comfortable and everything in him immediately stood at attention.

 _Dead kittens._

“My feet are cold," she said in a quiet, slightly defensive voice. "And if my feet are cold, the rest of me is cold and I _can’t_ –”

“Schhh, darling. It’s fine.” 

It _wasn’t_ fine.

Scorp closed his eyes and wrapped an arm around her. Insidious lightning struck and Rose’s cold hand found his own, pulling herself closer. 

Too close for comfort. Too warm, too herself.

 _Dead kittens_. 

“This is a terrible idea,” he whispered, his nose brushing against her neck. He was rewarded with a sharp inhale and everything in him stirred. 

So close. So damned close. It would be so easy to place a kiss that one freckle and then a million more on every single one on her body. 

_Dead_. _Kittens_.

“You want me to go?” Her hand tightened around his own and she turned to look at him, which didn’t help, because her lips were slightly parted and she visibly swallowed when their eyes met. 

_Dead kittens and pandas and puppies._

_Expired takeout._

_His Grandmother_.

Yep, that one did it.

He sighed, resting his forehead against the side of her head and closing his eyes. “Stay.”

Even if he was just a glorified hot water bottle. Even if it did kill him, which didn’t seem too beyond the realm of possibility right about now.

And he’d die a happy (if tormented) man. 

* * *

The second he’d opened his eyes, she’d realised the mistake she’d made - the look on his face had almost sent her back screaming into her room. Now, however, with his arm around her and his breathing steady against her neck, Rose wondered if the gains outweighed the obvious discomfort they were both in.

For one, her feet had never been warmer - be it because she was leeching off his body heat or because her frenzied heart was beating at a cheery _allegro_ , she’d rather not wonder.

Except she did. The conclusion she’d reached was that the pillow between them was the only thing keeping her sane. The fact that he felt like he needed it was also a bit… flattering? Maybe? 

A _lot_ flattering.

“Scorp?”

Would it be too improper to say she wanted to tear off his clothes outright? 

His breathing hitched on his throat. “Yes, dear?”

Ever the tone of sarcasm, _if_ slightly shaky. 

She rested the back of her head against his forehead and he sighed into her neck. It made every single of her hairs stand on end and her pulse hum and, unlike when the storm did it, she just wanted him to do it again.

“Are you happy?”

Probably not the best middle of the night conversation but her other option was turning around and kissing him, which could potentially turn this whole confinement thing into a very awkward situation.

Happiness it was.

“Right now,” he asked, stirring against her, “or in general?”

 _Right now_ , her entire body screamed. 

“Both,” she shrugged. “Either.”

“In general I’d say I’m –” He sighed into her neck again, sending a pleasant tingle up her spine. “–probably happy.”

“ _Probably_? That’s a very cavalier attitude.”

“Probably,” he repeated, yawning and nuzzling closer to her. “Happiness is grossly overrated. A bit too fickle for my taste, I like my emotions a bit more consistent." 

"Cynicism isn't an emotion, Scorp," she said, letting out a chuckle.

"You're right, darling, it's not." His fingers traced hers thoughtfully and he let out a quiet peel of caustic laughter into her ear. "It's a lifestyle." After a few seconds he added, "Are you? Happy, I mean?”

An excellent question with far too complicated an answer. One that included ‘I’d be happier if your hands were’.

“Yes,” she lied, summarizing it somewhat. “Most of the time.”

“When you’re not in a murderous strop, you mean.” He chuckled lightly, his fingers brushing lightly against hers. “I’m surprised I’ve gotten this long without ticking you off.”

“You tick me off plenty.”

“Clearly not enough to merit a strop.”

“No.” His arm tightened around her and Rose smiled into her pillow. “It’s not about what makes me angry, it’s mostly just –”

“Just?”

“It’s what makes me _sad_ ,” she whispered.

The very word hurt. Sadness was the sort of thing best left hidden from view, cloaked with a smile. Even just masked with anger, it hurt less.

“Rose?”

Her heart pounded against her ribcage as his nose brushed against her neck.

“Yes, dear?” she asked, except there was nothing ironic about it.

“Nothing.”

* * *

Coming out and telling her he was happy right now and that he wanted to move into her living room forever seemed like a demented stretch caused by the downwards migration of his blood. 

He hadn’t thought he’d ever be grateful for lightning, but the occasional jolt was doing wonders for his sanity.

Halfway through the night she’d gotten up and tiptoed her way back to her room. Instead of holding on, he’d let her, feigning sleep - sleep that, feeling spurned, had apparently decided to take the scenic route back, because it was nowhere to be seen from then on. 

Not even a wink. 

* * *

“Good morning, sunshine.”

The look he threw her could have frozen hell over.

“ _Too_ _happy_ ,” he hissed, taking the mug from her hand. “Sleep well? Feet warm enough?”

His tone made her wince. It wasn’t a friendly enquiry as to her wellbeing, he was _definitely_ salty about it.

There were dark circles under his eyes and he looked miserable and, even then, she could feel her blood calling out to him. Like the storm, it beckoned. His lips had accidentally brushed the back of her neck at one point and she thought she’d go mad from it. She’d had to move in the middle of the night again, run for dear life and bear the pain of cold feet alone.

She’d been too optimistic.

“About last night --”

Scorp shook his head and held out a dismissive hand. “The blight of cold feet isn’t to be taken lightly.”

She had a feeling he wasn’t just talking about literal cold feet.

* * *

People were resilient buggers, Scorp thought, forearm resting pressed against the window as he watched the rainfall. The storm raged outside, feeble now as their bodies adjusted, powerless in the face of human adaptability. Where a thunder would make their skin jolt a day before, it merely tingled now.

You could get used to anything. 

Scorp figured at one point he’d get over it, he’d forget how she’d felt in his arms, how it had felt so fundamentally right. 

What was ‘right’ anyway? ‘Right’ was nothing but a social construct. This wasn’t ‘right’, it was a glitch, a complete anomaly. Fake News, Stockholm Syndrome at best. Any two people thrust into close quarters would feel the same.

In the cold light of the real world, this pervasive feeling of closeness, of _belonging_ would be nothing but a distant dream. 

They’d go back to Good News, Bad News and this would be Old News, the sort that you crumpled into a ball and tossed in the trash, forgotten a few hours later as soon as something new and exciting came along.

* * *

“What’s up with all the office shags?”

Scorp looked up from the book he’d been reading - Rose had recommended Agatha Christie and it was _riveting_ \- at the window, where she was staring at him from her own book - _still_ Seventy Ways to Yell ‘Argh’, because she read with all the speed of a tortoise. 

A tortoise with a stubbed toe.

He figured if there was something like domestic bliss, this would be it - minus the intrusive, out-of-the-blue questions and the wrist-slicing sexual tension. Or maybe with them, Scorp wasn’t entirely sure.

“Where’s that come from?”

“Something I read.” She set the book down - one of the pastel fluff covered menaces - and curled her knees into her sweater, wrapping her arms around them. “I don’t get it. You don’t _look_ like a womanizer. You don’t _feel_ like a manwhore. Are you dating these girls?”

It clearly wasn’t meant to be offensive - she was actually asking. Not snapping, not judging (alright, maybe a little underlying judgement, but she couldn’t help herself), actually asking about it. 

“No.” He sighed and sat up. “Not serious enough to report –”

“– but serious enough to shag them on your _desk_?”

Entering dangerous territory now. 

“Rose…”

“No, really, I want to know,” she said, sounding a bit _too_ calm. “What were you _thinking_?”

“I wasn’t,” he admitted, shaking his head. “It’s not like I went in, ‘today’s a great day to shag someone at the office, let’s rub it all over Rose Weasley’s face’ –”

From the looks of it, they already _were_ in dangerous territory and he’d somehow managed to sink up to his waist before he’d noticed what was happening.

“What if it hadn’t been me? What if it were someone else walking in?” Her eyes narrowed at him. “It’s called _gross misconduct_ for a reason! For the love of Merlin, it’s the sort of thing that gets you _sacked_ and you go at it not once, but _twice_?! Twice that I sodding know of –”

And there they were. And, as usual, Scorp had no idea how she’d gone from 0 to a 100, but they were now at a 110. 

“– but _no_ , you just _have_ to be a degenerate wanker who can’t keep it in your pants, don’t you?”

Sooner all later there’d be a dagger stuck in his heart and he’d be bleeding out all over her couch. 

“And don’t you dare tell me it ‘happened’ because these things don’t just happen,” she yelled, pulling her legs from under her sweater, “you don’t just trip and fall into someone’s fanny! It’s not a ‘whoopsie’, you’re a grown man and you should know better than to –”

It wasn’t about what made her angry, it was about what made her sad. 

Right now, he was having a hard time discerning any sadness whatsoever.

“– Merlin, I swear, it’s like you _wanted_ to get caught! Which I guess is the point of having an office fling in the first place, isn’t it, the thrill? Normal people get their kicks out of doing something else, like, I don’t know, _dragon-riding_ , but _no_ , you had to pound into both bloody Hocus Pocus and Arts and Warts, both of whom I can never look in the eye again!”

His eyes met hers and, for the first time, he pinpointed what was happening under all that spitting anger.

 _Hurt_.

“Not to mention the whole hassle when everyone finds out! Do you have any idea of the sort of bullshit hurdles _decent_ people have to go through to get a relationship approved? And yet here you are, throwing buggering caution to the wind, subjecting yourself to a potential harassment claim…”

In the absence of an office door to slam, Rose stomped out of the room and Scorp heard a door banging, presumably her room. Predictably, after a minute or so, she came back.

“ _And another thing_ ,” she cried, “how _dare_ you come into my house and snoot all over my spoons?”

He’d hoped it’d just be an angry spell, the sort regular people did. Unfortunately, it seemed like on top of the crawling skin and constant feeling of discomfort from the storm, he now had to deal with an “And Another Thing” day in a far too confined space.

* * *

There was a rap at the door and Rose wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Go _away_ ,” she moaned, turning to bury her face in her pillow.

Every single time. Childish hissy fits that left her shaking and far too much shame to apologise after the fact. Everything coming out except what really mattered and possibly one or two things she didn’t mean just for the sake of letting him have it.

Her therapist was going to have a field day with this. She always seemed so terribly pleased about it in a sort of smug, ‘I Told You So’ way. ‘Practice saying your feelings with ‘I’ sentences’, she’d say.

 _I am upset_.

Why on earth was she upset? She had no right to be upset about anything. 

‘Avoid judgement. It’s fine to feel the way you do.’

But was it?

She was the one who’d invited him over and it was expected that he’d poke fun at, if not everything, _some_ things. Why on earth would she expect anything different? On top of it all, he hadn’t even been _that_ dickish, just… she didn’t even know what the word for it was, but it was like seeing a Muggleborn walking into Hogwarts for the first time.

Awe maybe. Some judgement, but mostly… awe? Awe wasn’t bad. Awe wasn’t supposed to be bad and yet it _was_. 

Like he was expecting something else and she’d somehow fallen too short or too far.

Another tap. “Rose?” 

And then there was the fact that his shoulder-glance as he shagged someone else was still engraved in her mind, possibly forever.

 _I am upset_.

Of course she was upset. Every touch reminded her of it. Every word, every laugh, every stupid far too personal conversation. He was supposed to be a co-worker, at best a friend and yet there was this ridiculous static between them that had her toes curling in situations where they definitely shouldn’t.

“Are you alright?” 

He sounded concerned, which was a new one. When she got one of her hissy fits, he usually just stared blankly at her with a ‘you done yet, I have things to do, places to be, y’know, actually important things’ look on his face. 

Usually, after the fact, he just looked _amused_.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she hissed at the door. “Now bugger off.”

 _I am… jealous_.

The word made her grimace. It was so ugly, so petty, so stupid. She would’ve liked to feel disgusted at the scene or outraged at the cheek or even concerned for his job - all of those would have been reasonable reactions.

Instead, she was _jealous_.

“Next thing you’ll be telling me you feel ‘fab’.” There was another tap at the door and Rose felt her misery simmering. “Can I come in?”

 _Yes_.

“ _No_.”

* * *

It was a few hours before the door opened and Rose finally came out. She’d apparently decided to skip the snapping stage altogether and had instead jumped straight to pointedly pretending nothing had happened.

“How’s the book?” she asked softly, handing him a mug of steaming coffee. “Is that _Murder on the Links_? How are you already done with _Styles_? Do you eat books instead of reading them?”

There it was again, the comfortable happiness covering unknown depths of something else.

“You’re the one who reads like you’re limping your way to the end.”

“I like to _enjoy_ my books, thank you very much.”

Scorp was tempted to let it go, to sink into pretence headfirst, to follow along and ignore it.

It would’ve been _so_ easy.

“Are you alright?” he asked quietly, sitting upright on his seat and scowling at her. “Care to tell me what that was all about?” Her smile faltered and she shook her head and Scorp continued with a bitter laugh, “No, of course you don’t.”

He’d never actually gotten a chance to have at her after one of her little outbursts. There was always a thin veneer of civility back at the Prophet.

That veneer was all but shattered now and he refused to go back to it.

“I’m sorry.”

That was him, not her. Rose never actually apologised for anything she said when she was in the throes of her anger, not with words anyway. Words made her defensive, which was ridiculous because they made their living with words.

Words should’ve been easy.

“What for?” she asked, letting out an uncomfortable little laughter, and sitting at the window - as far from his as was possible without there being something obviously wrong, he gathered. “Did you put _Styles_ back whence it came from?”

She seemed to have suddenly developed a case of very selective deafness.

“Darling, this really _is_ unbecoming.” Scorp sighed and got up to his feet. She stared back at him blankly, lower lip shaking slightly and Scorp had to put his heart on ice so he wouldn’t get dragged into indulging this bullshit façade. He took a seat next to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “I am _sorry_.”

She stiffened and asked blithely, “What are you sorry _for_?”

Scorp let out a mirthless laugh: what _was_ he sorry for? Was he sorry that he’d laughed at her mismatched spoons? Was he sorry he’d shagged Whoever and Whatever?

The answer was ‘obviously not’. 

Perhaps ‘obviously’ was a little hyperbolic, but he wasn’t sorry.

Fine, he definitely _was_ sorry.

“I just am.” He brushed the hair away from her face and she leaned into him. “You could just _tell_ me when I’m being a git. I get that it’s more efficient to go at it in batches but –”

“I’m sorry.”

He must’ve misheard her, he thought, because there was no way –

“I’m _so_ sorry.”

There it was again. His delusions were becoming more vivid.

Scorp looked down at her to confirm he wasn’t, in fact, mental and found Rose Weasley doing something that further convinced him he was in need of psychiatric assistance - there was a single tear rolling down her cheek.

She was _crying_.

At the sight of it, his heart - which up until now had been happily frozen on ice - was dunked into a tin of boiling water. 

That is to say, it _cracked_. 

* * *

She wasn’t entirely sure which of them had started it. What she did know was that one moment she’d been struggling to get a stupid ‘I’ sentence out and the next his mouth was on hers and her heart was just about ready to go off on her.

The reason she wasn’t sure who had started it was that, at present, her fingers were crumpled into a fist at his shirt dragging him closer. Then again, both of his hands were cupping her cheeks pulling her to him, so she was guessing they both had plausible deniability.

As far as first kisses went, this one was simply terrible. It wasn’t in the realm of sweet first kisses, of soft brushes and tender touches, oh _no_ , this one was smack dab in foreplay land, their hands and mouths moving with downright desperation. 

Lips kissed, teeth dragged over exposed skin. Hands touched, pulled and demanded until she was pressed against the wall of her window nook and had somehow dragged Scorp on top of her. 

No gentle rain, more like a storm.

He let out a sardonic chuckle and Rose’s eyes widened as she threw him a questioning ‘what the hell, mate?’ look. 

“I was just reminding myself that when I inevitably muck this up,” he said, tilting his head toward the rain still hammering outside, “I’ll get kicked out into _that_.” 

Rose blinked. “When _what_?”

His fingers were gently tracing the back of her neck and his eyes were soft… but the smile he was giving her was as caustic as ever. “That or when you finally come to your senses.” 

He brushed his lips against hers again and again and _again_ and Rose’s heart hummed as a thumb brushed the skin under the edge of her shirt. He _sniggered_ and pulled away, leaving her gasping for breath. 

“In the interest of honesty,” he continued, his breath ragged against her ear, “I’d rather you did it sooner than later.”

Pessimistic wanker.

Rose sighed and pulled the fistful of shirt away from her (yet another one that fit him far too well) to give him a hard look - except she was feeling far too happy, so the resulting scowl was a disgrace to the rest of its species.

“You really _do_ feel the need to ruin everything good in this world,” she scolded, shaking her head with amazement. He opened his mouth, irony clearly at the tip of his tongue and Rose pressed an admonishing kiss to it. “And don’t you dare give me that ‘can’t break what’s already broken’ rubbish, you’re not a vase.”

He pulled himself up and raked a hand through his hair, eyes slightly pained. “How are you not more torn up about this?”

The answer was simple: she was far too _happy_ to give a buggering tosh about anything else. 

Cuddling baby dragons and kneazles had _nothing_ on this.

Rose frowned slightly. “ _Should_ I be more torn up about it?”

She didn’t feel particularly repressed as of right now, but that didn’t mean a thing. Just because her lady bits kept cheering ‘get on with it’, that didn’t mean they were _right_ \- it _had_ been a while and she _was_ going a bit spare from the lack of human warmth.

He let out another bitter laugh. “Not an hour ago you were telling me off for sleeping with a co-worker.” 

Rose’s heart sank at the word ‘sleeping’. 

“Sleeping? I assumed it was just sex,” she said quietly, slowly backing away from under him. 

‘Sleeping’ wasn’t the same as ‘shagging’. ‘Sleeping’ was intimate. ‘Sleeping’ implied possession of some sort.

She didn’t even want to _look_ at him, her unseeing eyes moving to take in her formerly warm living room. It now felt like it was oozing misery. She’d have to move, find somewhere _else_ with a perfect window seat –

“Rose…”

“ _Were_ you sleeping with them?” Alright, clearly there was _some_ repression at work here. “Better yet, _are_ you sleeping with them?”

Silence.

Rose shook her head and bit her lip, twisting up the bun that had come undone in his hands, bracing herself for the worst. 

“No...?” 

“Oh, thank Merlin,” she said, tilting her chin up at him, her face immediately falling at his scowl. “Then why –”

Except she didn’t finish her sentence because his mouth was on hers again.

* * *

Her lips brushed against his again and again and Scorp scowled: as far as decisions went, this was by far the stupidest.

No, wait, this was. 

He pressed her against the wall, burying his face in her neck, his fingers tangling in her hair, untwisting the knot she’d just put together, revelling in the chaos of it. She smelled like sunshine but _more_ , like she’d gone swimming in it. 

While he was busy weaving inane considerations about her hair, Rose was proving to be of a more enterprising nature, her fingers giving his belt a meaningful tug.

 _Merlin_.

His inside hiss must’ve shown on the outside because she peeked at him, a sunny smile on her face that made everything inside of him melt into a mushy pile. A single question in her eyes, ‘ _Yes?’._

“ _Yes_ ,” he whispered, cupping her face between his hands until the back of her head bumped against the wall, and his mouth was on hers again, “all the ‘yes’.”

A trail of clothes followed them to the couch as they stumbled and fumbled and, all the while, she was looking at him like… well, it might be a little presumptuous of him, but she looked _happy_ to see him. 

Like he was a sodding baby panda.

Scorp didn’t care -- so long as she kept on looking. 

And she did, blue eyes laughing as they toppled over and onto that terribly comfortable couch, dislodging the copy of _Seventy Ways to Yell ‘Argh’_ as she fell over him at first, pinning him down with a self-satisfied laugh and then a whimper as he flipped her around and all but pounced her. 

For some reason he _still_ couldn’t fathom, she still hadn’t stopped him, hadn’t put a hand to his chest and told him to ‘bugger off’. 

For some reason, she was still in his arms and he hadn’t woken up from this.

Not _yet_ anyway.

She was there, alive and warm and happy and, just for the time being, _his_.

Scorp had no idea what to make of it, he just kept following her lead as she tugged his shirt off, as she struggled with his buttons, as she kicked his pants away. As she wrapped her arms around his neck and smiled into the kiss, as her eyes crinkled and her hands buried themselves in his hair almost _lovingly_. 

_Merlin_. 

He just kept waiting for every kiss to be the last, every touch, every --

She stopped suddenly, eyes wide with horror, the flimsiest of remaining layers between them and Scorp hovered motionless over her for a hair-raising second, all the blood freezing in his veins.

There it was. This was it. The proverbial shoe dropping.

“The magic’s down,” was what she said instead, her voice a strained hiss. “ _Bugger_.”

Not ‘bugger off’, ‘bugger’. 

Scorp shook his head uncomprehendingly for a second, wincing motionlessly as she sat back up, a crease between her eyebrows. Her eyes softened and she planted a peck on his lips - a hopeful band-aid on a gaping wound - before slipping out from under him and standing, hand buried in her red hair and pacing aimlessly around - which _felt_ like Bad News.

* * *

He clearly wasn’t getting the _gravity_ of the situation - men never did. The very concept eluded them entirely. While Muggle men were practically doling out condoms at the _thought_ , the merest _whiff_ of sex, wizarding blokes didn’t want a wand anywhere near their… well, _wand_.

But it was _obviously_ fine for women to enchant their fannies. 

“ _Magic’s down_ ,” she enunciated slowly, giving her nethers a meaningful look that seemed to fly completely over his head. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

He kept staring blankly back at her, sitting back on the couch in nothing but a - very promising - tent in his briefs and was still giving her that daft, shell-shocked look. 

“Unless you want to risk a small bundle of joy calling you ‘Da-Da’ in a nearby future--”

It was like his brain had snapped itself back together at the words. “You’re talking about _birth control_?” He blinked once and then got up to his feet, arm coiling around her waist and practically sweeping her off her feet. “ _That’s it_?”

He sounded relieved and Rose scoffed. “Much as I love you I don’t fancy being a mum just now.”

 _Much as I love you_.

Her eyes widened just as the words came out, hanging heavy in the air. Far too massive for this particular moment and her horrified face met Scorp’s scowl. 

“You _what_?” 

A disaster if Rose had ever seen one. His eyebrows shot upwards and his arm tightened around her, free hand gently pushing her hair aside. His eyes were pleading and Rose didn’t have the smallest idea if he wanted her to say she didn’t or if he wanted her to repeat it. 

In the end, she went with her gut, optimism pushing her forward, making her braver than she felt. “Apparently. I mean, I know I _like_ you, who the hell knows, I _might_ love --”

Happiness did breed happiness, apparently, because his mouth was back on hers and he was smiling, really, _really_ smiling, none of that smirky, bitter, cynical rubbish. 

Just for her. Just the one.

_(A/N: skippety skip for smut)_

The words died as his fingers moved south, gently brushing her soft skin, tracing circles on her legs, digging into her inner thighs in a way that made her whimper. Lightly grazing the wet spot centre stage in her knickers, his eyebrows shooting upwards first with surprise before his face melted back into the ironic, familiar smile.

His hands resumed their exploration and his mouth met hers again, soft lips tugging, teeth biting, nipping _everywhere_ , moving to her chest, tongue flicking a sensitive nipple. 

“Scorp” she whispered, shuddering as his fingers grazed the exact spot that was aching for him. “ _Fuck_.”

“Little Miss Sunshine _swearing_ ,” he said against her mouth, shaking his head and letting out one of his laughs as her senseless fingers tugged at his hair. Impatient. Demanding. “Will the wonders never cease?”

“Do you need to be so --”

The words drowned in her throat and she croaked out some sort of nonsense as he gave her nipple a cheeky pinch. 

“ _Yes_ ,” he whispered in her ear, teeth grazing the sensitive shell of her ear. “And since you ‘apparently’ _love_ me, I’m thinking about doing it some more.”

She pulled back to look at him, to give him a smile of her own in exchange for his, to kiss, to touch the matching part of him that felt hard against her thigh, rallying out a groan of his own.

A purposeful palm dragged a moan from her and her legs almost gave out.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she repeated when a finger slowly hooked around the flimsy, wet piece of fabric and pulled it aside, slowly, deliberately slowly until her fingers were tearing at his hair. “What about you?”

“What _about_ me?” he asked with a grin, hand stopping in its tracks and keeping her teetering on the knife-edge between wretched frustration and delightful relief. 

Her own hand rubbed him through the fabric of his underpants, slowly tracing him and she smiled as he unconsciously thrust into her hand. She smiled as his eyes closed to inhale sharply when her fingers brushed across the taut stomach, the patch of silky blonde hair before launching an ambitious campaign into his briefs. 

She gave him a daring stroke, two, three, ten as their hands moved together, bodies tugging and pushing and pulling… and then all hell broke loose. His mouth was on hers again, tongue brushing against hers, hands pinning hers to the sides of her head, far away from the straining in his pants. 

“Scorp…”

“Hush, darling,” he said with a little sardonic little smile. “At this rate, I’ll be embarrassing myself _forever_.”

A knee moved between her legs, spreading them apart and she was everything but begging him to move, her hips rolling in hopes of finding _some_ relief, _any_ relief... and all the while he pressed kisses on her mouth, on her face, on her _everything_ until she thought she was going to go mad. 

“Scorp --”

His slick fingers outlined an exploratory and painfully stingy first draft on her wetness, before going back for some serious editing that tore out a choked “y _es_ ” from her. 

There was no fucking around, no fumbling, no hesitation, no original ‘changing it up’ like stupid Ethan had insisted on doing - Scorp had somehow figured what worked and was just deliberately and consistently rubbing the soul out of her, like a bloody exorcism. 

He just kept building her up and tearing her down, dragging moan after moan, ‘ _yes_ ’ after glorious ‘ _yes_ ’ until she was a gasping, shuddering, panting and _profoundly_ happy mess.

His arm wove itself around her waist and Scorp held her up, feet floating off the ground for a second before he set her down again.

“Now,” he said quietly, breath ragged on her neck, “you were saying about birth control?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, first forays into smutty territory are what they are, so I'm terribly self-conscious about it. Thanks to everyone who showed this some love on the last chapter, namely HildaCobble, EnolaScamander and Anna_Elephant! If you're reading and enjoying this, please do leave a note! Tell me what you love, what you hate, what made you laugh or what tore at your little heart.
> 
> (Next chapter coming soonish, because this got a little out of hand and it's clearly a 4 chapter, not 3.)
> 
> Stay safe everyone and wishes of a great weekend! Love, Maria ❤️


	4. Chapter 4

His head was resting against her chest, arms wrapped around her waist. Her fingers were gently stroking his hair and Scorp’s heart was doing this weird thing where it was… _settled_. 

There wasn’t another word to describe it. 

Like slipping into fresh pyjamas after a long hot shower, skin soft and tingling at the same time, eyes heavy with sleep. Like every single piece of the universe had clicked together and made sense all at once, precariously held together by the bundle of red curls he was holding in his arms.

She was rubbing off on him, it was the only explanation. The second he let go of her, it’d be over and everything would come toppling down.

“Merlin, I’m happy,” Rose said, fidgeting in his arms. “And _starving_. I think there’s still crumble, I’m going to go –”

“ _No_.”

The apprehensive hold tightened around her. 

Was it too much to ask? For it to just… be. 

“I’ll be back in a jiff. I _promise_.” 

She fobbed him off with a small smile on her face and scampered over to the door of the bedroom, a spring on her step. Just when his heart was starting to beat melancholy, she stopped, looked over her shoulder at him and smiled.

The gloom bounced right off.

Sweet Merlin, what in the world was happening here?

She hovered at the door for a second, tilting her head to look at him and biting her lower lip. “Want to come with?”

He stared back at her for a second. “To the _kitchen_?”

It sounded inane, but he did. Want to, that is. 

“Yes.” Rose skipped back to bed and let herself fall back into the sea of sheets next to him, bed bouncing with mirth at having her back. “No?”

His fingers tugged at her waist, making a feeble attempt to reel her back in.

"Yes." This couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t. “But we need to talk about this.” 

“Oh, no, Mr Bad News,” she said, evading his fingers and pressing a rogue kiss on his face before jumping right off the bed again. “You’re not ruining this for me.”

She was like a toddler, brimming with energy, skipping over to extract a clearly male robe from her wardrobe.

“But…”

“Nope.” She sat down on the edge of the bed next to him and leaned in to give him yet another kiss, like she was full of them and it was clearance day. “I’m terribly happy right now and I’m starving, which means I’m going to bake.”

His nose scrunched. “More crumble?”

“Chocolate, actually.” 

“Chocolate’s nice.” One of his hands played with the belt of her robe. “But we _should_ talk.”

“Nope,” she said, leaning in to press a kiss on his cheek. “No talking, just chocolate. And more kissing, maybe.”

She let out a small delighted squeal when his arms wrapped around her waist and pulled her flush against him. She kissed him again, her fingers gently raking at his hair before she braced herself on his chest, smile gone from her face.

“You need to ignore what I said before,” Rose said, pressing her forehead lightly against his. “The whole… ‘I maybe love you’ thing. It was unfair considering you’re trapped in here with me for the foreseeable future.”

He stared vacantly back. “Unfair. In what world can you fancying me be construed as ‘unfair’?”

“This one.” She nodded gravely. “It’s an impossible situation for you. You’re a forced guest at least until the roads are open again which means you’re _technically_ under duress and everything out of your mouth is therefore inadmissible.”

“ _Inadmissible_? _Duress_?” Scorp’s laugh was brittle. “I’m under a lot of things, foremost of them being _you_ ,” he said, hand gently stroking her thigh, “but _duress_ isn’t one of them.”

“Isn’t it?” She smiled for a second, only for her to shake herself. “No. We’re not getting into this. I refuse to.” She struggled and shimmied herself away from his arms, skittering from the bed and toward the door again. “You coming?”

The answer to that was a resounding ‘yes’.

* * *

Oh, sweet, blissful ignorance and meaningless conversation. Scorp had apparently caught up with the program and was indulging the chit chat, which she thoroughly appreciated.

“What’s up with all the classics collecting dust?” Scorp asked, pointing a chocolatey spoon toward a nearby shelf. “Have you read them all?”

Rose sniggered, placing a bowl with ice-cream in front of them. “Yes.” She tilted her head at the shelf and sighed. “I’ll read anything once and I do love them from a literary standpoint, but I refuse to read Dostoiévski again.”

His forehead furrowed. “Why not? I love Dostoiévski. Crime and Punishment is beautiful.”

“Of course you would, it’s the most depressing thing ever written,” she said with a shrug, scooping a spoonful of ice-cream. “Much like your column, it should be called Doom and Gloom.”

“Everything the man writes is a masterpiece. He pinned down human suffering and wrestled it into words, how do you _not_ like it?!”

Rose snorted. “I _do_ like it. But it made me feel like a tattered rag for the entire week I was reading it.” 

“That’s the whole _point_!”

He looked frankly indignant and Rose let out a laugh. “Ah,” she said wryly, “but _I_ don’t like feeling like a tattered rag. And most of the time, I just choose not to.”

Her entire life was just a bundle of repression, wasn’t it?

“Is that why we’re not talking about it?”

Ice-cream went down the wrong pipe and she choked, coughing until she thought a lung might pop out. His hand was at her back, doing that inane patting thing people do but that didn’t really help at all and it took her a full twenty seconds to pick herself together.

“Was that a ‘yes’? I feel like that was a ‘yes’.” Scorp shook his head, looking a thousand shades of incredulous. “Do you think chatting about us will make you _sad_?”

She shrugged, letting out a final cough. “I don’t _feel_ like it will. But you _do_ have a knack for making Good News go Bad.”

“Are we Good News?”

Her smile faltered momentarily. "Aren't we?”

“All Good News are just Bad News in the making,” he said, resting his cheek on his hand. “It’s one of life’s inevitabilities.”

“Some Good News even you can’t ruin.”

He let out a laugh. “I’ll bet you a fiver I can.”

“Probably.” She reached out to brush a strand of the blond hair falling on his eyes. “What I don’t get is why you’d _want_ to.”

Not when it was perfect as it could be. You didn’t mess with this sort of wholesomeness.

“I don’t, but statistically I will.”

“I wouldn’t let you.” She leaned in, bare skin against his, arms sliding around his waist. She pressed a small kiss on his shoulder before resting her chin on it. “You’re far too pessimistic for your own good.”

“You’re far too optimistic for _my_ own good.” He put his head to hers and scowled. “You don’t really think this would work, do you?”

“I didn’t want to presume there was a ‘this’,” Rose said softly, arms slackening before she let go of him. After a few seconds, she asked, “Is there a ‘this’ on your end?”

“Yes.”

“Duress,” she pointed out.

“I thought you said there would be no rhyming in this house.”

They stared at each other for a second and Rose couldn’t help a smile. “Accidental rhyming doesn’t count.”

Scorp chuckled. “Like involuntary manslaughter doesn’t?”

“It’s _involuntary_.”

“The end result is still someone ends up dead. Or, in this case, egregious rhymes running rampant.” His hand cupped the back of her neck and he placed his lips on her neck. “And since the debauchery levels are already gargantuan at this point --”

He didn’t get to end the sentence because she was far too busy kissing him.

* * *

In the end she ducked all meaningful conversation with the word ‘duress’ or something equivalent. ‘Coercion’ was thrown around some, same as ‘imprisonment’ as well as some facetious similes about ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ and how one wouldn’t ‘criticise terrible canapés at a dinner party’.

Some seriousness slipped through the cracks, mostly in the quiet of the night, when he was holding her in his arms. Unhappiness didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of actually surviving in this hostile environment of kissing and skin-to-skin.

“All evidence to the contrary,” she whispered, “we _do_ get along.”

Tentative honesty cleaving its way to their hearts. Nothing but pillow talk, but pillow talk was better than no talk at all.

“ _Everyone_ gets along at first,” he said airily. “It’s called the honeymoon stage.”

“We’re not everyone,” she pointed out. “I’m me. You’re you.” She leaned on her shoulder and frowned at him briefly. “Is this just you being a Debbie Downer or should I feel concerned?”

She was saying it lightly, as a joke, but it was an exceptionally sensible question.

“How are you _not_? How do you look at me and think ‘yes, this is _It_ ’?”

“I didn’t know you wanted to be _It_ ,” she said, frowning slightly. “Do you want to be _It_?”

Yes. Now that she’d asked it, the answer to that question was ‘yes’.

Anything else was just a barbarous display of ineptitude.

“I’m just a notch then?” he asked, burying his nose in her neck and kissing a stray freckle. “A passing ship in the night that’ll leave even more shirts in your closet that you won’t get rid of for some misguided reason?”

She stared at him blankly. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“You think _you’re_ a notch?” Rose blinked. “Last I checked I wasn’t the one shagging people against my desk.”

“Dare I point out that you’re the one avoiding The Talk like it’s the plague?”

He _felt_ the rightness in his bones. He _knew_ she loved him, same as he knew he’d never let her go if he was given the chance.

Her avoidance, however, felt like Bad News, a perverse twist on some terribly Good News that, at this rate, might never see the light.

For the first time, Scorp wasn’t amused at the prospect.

“You’re not just a notch,” she said quietly, hand digging into his hair and stroking gently it in that affectionate sort of way that made him feel… _loved_.

Again and again.

“You’re not a notch either,” he said. “Not in any version of this story. Not the initial draft, not the first revision, not alpha, not beta, not the first edition.”

“I’m not?” She threw him a sideglance. “I mean, you are trapped with me, it’s not like you could _say_ it was even if I was.”

Scorp scowled. “You’re _not_ a just notch.”

“Again,” Rose said, letting out a laugh, “it’s not like you _could_ say I am. You’re essentially trapped. You have to look at my face at least until --”

“ _You’re not a notch_!” Scorp sighed and raised his eyes heavenward. “You’re… _you_.”

She ignored him, frowning as he placed butterfly kisses all over her face. “I mean, I’d get it if I were. And while I did say something that was far too much--”

That she loved him.

"-- you don't need to feel like you owe me something. We're friends and that's not going away. We can still --"

“Did you mean it, though?”

Scorp’s heart shuddered as she buried her arms around his waist and whispered. “ _Yes_.”

“Good.” He held her tight, arms and legs entangled closer than was necessarily comfortable. “Because I feel the same. And it’d be a bugger if you didn't.”

“Duresse.”

“Bugger off,” he said quietly. “You _know_ I do love you.” After a few seconds of silence, he added, “Don’t you?”

Hair flailing madly as she nodded into his chest. “I don’t know, but I _know_. Does that make sense?” 

Scorp nodded back: nothing else had ever made as much sense.

* * *

The storm blew over like they knew it would. Magic returned and with it freedom. 

Unwanted freedom. Freedom that was far too scary.

She _really_ needed to call her therapist.

Rose hovered by the fireplace as Scorp picked up his bag and swung it over his shoulder. 

“It was great having you over,” she said, wrapping her arms around his waist. “You’re an excellent guest.”

“Even if I poked fun at your spoons?”

There was a vice in her chest as his hand traced over her back and up to her neck. 

Rose swallowed, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath that smelled like… him. “Even then.”

Maybe she could hold the memory forever. Maybe in ten years, she’d still remember how this felt, warm and safe and everything that love _should_ feel like.

“Rose?”

“Hmm?”

“Can I come back?”

She looked up at him and met the ever-present scowl. “What?”

“I’m thrilled that I’m going home.” He sniggered. “I need clothes that actually fit. And pyjamas. But --”

 _But_. That ‘but’ was incredibly promising.

“-- I was wondering if maybe…”

“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Just… yes.”

His mouth was on hers again and the whole leaving process was delayed for a while. 

Even as he stepped out into the fireplace, hair now dishevelled and lips almost raw from all the kissing, Rose clung to the feeling of _knowing_.

There was a sort of dazed determination to the way she strode into her bedroom and started pulling clothes from the wardrobe, tossing them into dark bags that had a one-way ticket into oblivion.

She was barely halfway through when she heard steps ringing in the living room.

“Honey, I’m home.”

If anything, the biting sarcasm to the words only made her happier - that and the fact that he had an armful of shirts in his arms and a toothbrush in one hand.

* * *

“You two are in a _relationship_ ,” Eddie repeated, a slight frown on his face. “You two? A _relationship_?” 

Eddie’s eyebrows shot upwards as he took them both in and Scorp fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat. Rose’s foot gave his a nudge and when he looked over at her, she gave him a smile.

“Yes,” she said, nodding gravely. “Serious business.”

“We’re getting a cat together, it’s absolutely revolting.”

“Cats,” she corrected with an eyebrow raise. “Plural.”

It was a topic of heated debate. Scorp claimed one was enough, but she was sure that whatever cat they’d get would like him better so she figured they should get two, one for each. 

Maximise the kitty love potential.

“The House of Lords still needs to approve that and I know they’ll side with me because I’m a man and they’re all sexist buggers.” Scorp sniggered, relaxing under her touch as her hand settled on his knee. “I still maintain no cat in its right mind would choose me over you.”

“Are you mental?! You’re a sour _puss_ , it’s in the word! You’ll be like catnip to them! You --”

"You’re _living_ together?" Eddie interrupted, an eyebrow raised. "Since when?”

“Six months maybe?” 

He threw an inquiring look at Rose and she shook her head. “Seven.”

“Seven months,” he said, nodding as circumspectly as she had. “Obviously seven.”

Rose rolled her eyes. “You keep forgetting.”

“I’m sorry if I’m too busy _living_ our co-dependent relationship to keep track of it.” He gave her hand a challenging tug. “For the record, it feels like it’s been _years_.”

Anger clawed at her chest. “Oh, really?! Maybe --”

“I meant that in a _good_ way, you bint.”

“You two are giving me a headache.” Eddie rubbed his fingers against the creases in his forehead. “Are you sure you’re not pulling my leg? Because if this is a lark it’s in very poor taste.”

Rose threw an inquiring look at Scorp - _he_ was the one who’d claimed it was better they’d wait. She’d find him scowling at her every so often and he’d inevitably say something caustic on the lines of ‘how are you _still_ here?’, which had led to a few hefty strops in the first few months. 

Upon further inquiry, it seemed he didn’t mean it as a bad thing. He was apparently convinced she’d wake up one day and realise he was Bad News. 

Which was of course rubbish because she _knew_ he was Good News.

Scorp snorted. “No, Eddie, I’m here begging you for a Consensual Relationship Agreement because I had nothing better to do with my lunch hour.” 

“That’s Debbie Downer’s way of saying ‘yes, we’re sure’ and 'no, it's not a joke'.” 

“It _is_ funny, but sadly there's no discernible punchline.”

His fingers found hers under the table and gave them a small tug. Under the whole caustic, insufferable smile he was giving her, there was something soft and warm and just hers.

He wasn’t just Good News, he was Excellent News.

The very best she’d ever gotten.

* * *

The door to his office flung open and Scorp met the storming face of his… girlfriend. Who happened to be terribly gorgeous even when she was in a murderous strop - perhaps even more so.

“ _And another thing,_ ” she screamed, banging the door shut behind her. “Next time you decide to leave your dishes unwashed at least give me a heads-up!”

Oh boy.

Scorp scoffed, getting up to his feet and sitting on the very edge of his desk. “Really?”

“ _Really_!”

Whatever was bugging her still hadn’t come out yet. So far it was just an irrelevant stream of domestic complaints about socks and replacing the toilet paper.

She huffed off and Scorp poured a packet of instant coffee into two mugs. By the time she was back, he had one ready for her and one for him.

“And--”

“Another thing?” he asked with a smile, holding out the coffee to her.

“Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy,” she stuttered, eyes flickering between the coffee and his face. “If you presume to think coffee will miraculously --”

“Oh, I don’t.”

At the very least, it threw her for a loop, which was immensely amusing.

To him, anyway.

Scorp rolled his eyes and walked over to her, gently placing her hands around the coffee mug. “What did I _really_ do?”

There had been no obnoxious ‘good morning, sunshine’ when she’d woken up. Instead, she’d rolled away from him in bed and pretty much stampeded all over the flat like she had a grudge to settle with the floorboards. 

If anything, she’d already _woken up_ stroppy, which was insane.

“Did I say something stupid in my sleep? Because I reserve myself the right to say inane things when I’m sleeping.”

“No! You--” she struggled to find the words, mechanically taking the proffered mug and glaring at it. “I--”

Scorp’s mouth curled upwards. “What did I _do_?”

His hand brushed her curls back and her lower lip trembled, her voice becoming very small. “You _cheated_ on me.”

“I _what_?”

Well, this was terrible. Tragic, really. They needed to call Fletcher in, the wanker would be thrilled to hear.

“With Daphne from Opinion,” she continued quietly. “In _Barcelona_. In front of the Sagrada Familia, which I find very distasteful because there were children watching.”

“Well, this is all news to me.” Scorp scowled, taking her mug from her hands and setting it down. “But I can see why you’d be terribly upset.” His arms wrapped around her waist and he pulled her to him until she was nestled comfortably in his arms. “What an arsehole.”

“No, you’re not.”

Scorp kissed the corner of her mouth and put his forehead to hers. 

“Dream Scorp?” She nodded and he scoffed. “Yes, Dream Scorp’s a _dick_.”

She let out a bitter chuckle. “You looked _happy_.”

There it was. It wasn’t about the dream or the cheating or the Daphne from Opinion.

“I _am_ terribly happy,” he protested, hand pulling the knot on her hair undone. “Just not with her.” 

“You are?” Rose’s hand tugged at the back of his shirt. “What about that rubbish about consistent emotions --”

“I am _consistently_ happy.”

“Even when I give you rot about your socks?”

Again with the very small voice.

“You don’t give me rot about my socks.” Scorp chuckled. “Not on the regular anyway.” 

She let out a huff. “Maybe I should.”

“Maybe you should,” he agreed. “But then I’d have to start complaining about the surplus of cake. I’ve gained at least three pounds since I moved in.”

Rose sniffed into his chest. “Nobody’s forcing you to eat it. And I like baking.”

In the end, he didn’t want her to stop. Her baking was a terribly accurate mood predictor, crumble for sad, chocolate for happy.

The other day she’d popped out some carrot cupcakes and he was _still_ trying to sort that one out.

Whatever it was, he was almost sure it was Good News.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Simply revolting. ❤️ Also slightly shorter than I'd predicted and eventually I might add some more to it when I'm in a Mood™️ but until then this is what came out. I'm going back to writing Witch Slap and watching GG and apparently at some point watching the seasons three (and four, omg?!) of The Crown!
> 
> As ever thank you EnolaScamander, Elanna, rebecca, HildaCobble, Anna_Elephant and Imnotthere93, y'all are perfect and I love your faces!
> 
> If you just read through this, lemme know what you thought! Love y'all and have a great one! ❤️


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